This ambitious book provides important reading for postgraduate students and researchers in the fields identified by its title. The title and opening chapter identify the broadest of its arguments, which is that accepted models of Enlightenment progress, especially in global economics (capital expansion and colonialism’s role in opening new capital markets) are unsustainable in the face of historical and textual evidence. The main trajectories of the book’s chapters place emphasis on other, related arguments, however. These concern the ways in which early colonialism was motivated by the twin evils of the costs of Early Modern warfare and the monopolism instigated by mercantile economics that developed with the collusion of the government, under the understanding that these economics would help decrease the growing national debt, itself largely the product of escalating military costs. To this end the monopolism instigated by mercantile economics and that itself directed behavior on the high seas and in early trading stations, developed with the collusion of the English government, under the understanding that these economics would help. In addition to these well-argued points, the book’s analytic chapters demonstrate that the Enlightenment’s own reading of its colonial activities was self-aware and highly critical, and that it did not unanimously approve of the ways in which national and international finances were moving state policies.

The literary texts analyzed in The Stillbirth of Capitalism demonstrate direct and indirect acknowledgements of the unethical and often horrifying acts perpetrated by the merchant-colonizers from as early as the seventeenth century, and at the same time show an understanding of the deeper forces underlying these acts. The non-literary texts analyzed are shown, similarly, to be wise to the ways of the East India Company and its brutalities overseas, but to have been misread by subsequent scholars. These readers—who theorized the Enlightenment for us—incorporated such misreadings or partial readings in key texts that gave rise to subsequent disciplines; it is implied that Marx relied, at least in one part of Capital, on an incomplete reading of Burke, for instance. The book’s various arguments and their many sources of evidence are repeated and developed through all the chapters, the last one tracing the implications of these and related activities for nineteenth-century, post-1813 Charter Act literature and for contemporary theory. Here, among other revelations, Said’s interpretations of Orientalism are shown not to have gone far enough.

The assumption that readers’ own mind-sets have been molded by critical theory and its postcolonial offshoots gives Ahmed’s comments an argumentative tone, and allows him to present them as novel and controversial. Bringing together evidence of literary and non-literary sources, and constantly reminding readers of subsequent and current ideological climates, the book follows in its methodology a broadly New Historicist approach. It is, then, open to the usual questions about this approach—is it good history, is it good literary scholarship?—whatever it is that we take “good” to mean in this context. The historical evidence produced is compelling, and the literary readings are illuminating and inspiring. In each case, however, there remains the question of representativeness: these materials provide very strong evidence for Ahmed’s arguments, but it would be stronger if readers were told how much more evidence of this nature is out there to be found. While the book is already almost overburdened with the complexities of interrelated ideas, actions, and interpretations, more indications of the extents to which other writers, or other writings by the writers under scrutiny (both literary and non-literary), displayed similar awareness could have strengthened the arguments. In this and other, more stimulating ways the book leaves the reader wanting more.

The texts whose references to Indian and East Indian affairs Ahmed analyzes at some length are: Dryden’s Amboyna, Defoe’s Captain Singleton, Sterne’s Bramine’s Journal (also known as Journal to Eliza), Foote’s Nabob, the anonymous Disinterested Nabob of 1787, Books 3 and 4 of Smith’s Wealth of Nations (which Ahmed shows to have been ignored in favor of Books 1 and 2), Bentham’s under-studied “Essay on the Influence of Time and Place on Matters of Legislation” (no English version was published in his lifetime), the speeches of Burke and Sheridan in the impeachment of Warren Hastings (this chapter is mostly on Burke; there is very little on Sheridan), Voltaire’s Lettres d’Amabed, Morgan’s Missionary, and Scott’s Guy Mannering. Taking an overview of this chronological sequence of readings, one may find in these texts movements from open criticisms of “merchant capital’s duplicity” (42) and the rapine of monopolistic policies in practice, to anxieties about the corruption underlying the new wealth from India and its degenerating influence on policy makers. From there we find demonstrations of novel ways of assuaging such anxieties and equally uncomfortable acknowledgements that Western European states (and, specifically, England) are themselves based upon the incursions of nomadic and barbarian peoples (a sub-text that seems to grow in time, and is shown to have reached thematic scale in Scott’s novel). Allaying these worries involved disguising the raw profiteering of the British presence in India through first a progressive sentimentalizing of colonial relationships, especially when rewriting the colonial other in terms of native traditions, and then through an imposed version of history, both activities being then manipulated in the formulation of new laws. By the second decade of the nineteenth century, the previously satirized eighteenth-century corrupt nabob had disappeared (105) to be recreated, in Scott’s novel, as “the figure of the aristocrat in the colony” (208).

Defoe scholars will be particularly interested in what Ahmed has to say about Captain Singleton. It is, after all, rare to find studies in the area of colonial and postcolonial literature focusing on this novel rather than starting, as they so often do, with Robinson Crusoe. The previous chapter on Amboyna introduced to the reader a number of facts and discussions about the island’s history of European colonialism and trade (it is present-day Maluku, Indonesia). These discussions having taken us to a finer understanding of the competition between Portuguese and Spanish colonial forces and the Dutch and English East India Companies, the analysis of Captain Singleton focuses on the inextricable relations between piracy and the dealings of the two East India Companies. The historical background is again detailed, showing how the state-backed monopolies of these companies meant that no independent trader could operate legally, with piracy and illicit individual trading by Company servants (which was unofficially encouraged by their employers) being inevitable consequences. The broader economic argument is that the monopolies killed off pre-existing, vibrant merchant networks and their earlier flows of capital, thus basing the subsequent entire capital system of modern England upon overt and covert piracy, as seen in both the Company- and the state-backed acts of rapine, appropriation, and monopoly, and their encouragement and unofficial integration of individual “privateers.” Defoe’s recurrent interest in pirates is thus shown to be closely connected to the economy of the expanding colonial trade-empire, and not merely a matter of extending the popular genre of criminal narratives.

The extent to which Captain Singleton shows awareness of these dynamics is considerable and demonstrated through some fine and complex readings that include investigations into the implications of concealed illicit origins (54–6), the collapsing of “the distinction between British merchants and pirates” (59), Defoe’s “elaborate understanding of Indian Ocean trading patterns” (60), the historical pertinence of Defoe’s representation of the Surat trading factory (63–4), and the strange long-term silencing and disguising of Singleton and William once they have returned to England (68–74). Before examining the novel in detail, however, the chapter brings together accepted understandings of Enlightenment economic history as progressive, with the modern writing of the history of the novel and its place in the broader history of capitalist society. Tracing the well-known arguments of Watt, McKeon, and Thompson to Lukács’ 1920 Theory of the Novel, Ahmed shows that early novels have been accepted as showing a progressive rise of bourgeois economic individualism while “whitewash[ing] their material history” (51), the political and the economic specifics of the individuals’ circumstances. Ahmed strongly opposes this view, arguing that this novel “is a wide-ranging exploration of the global monopoly system European states had imposed on the circulation of capital” that “touches on a material history of capitalism to which our histories of the novel are not yet attuned” (52). In his reading of the novel, Ahmed once more puts forward his main argument that Enlightenment writers illustrated how, contrary to “the widely accepted premise that European modernity unleashed capital globally, thereby first bringing the individual and socioeconomic mobility into history,” “European states and corporations together attempted … to subordinate the production of already flourishing non-European economies to their own war-making capacity” (53–4).

Apart from a statement that Defoe is not troubled by contradictions in his writing, the concluding remarks of the chapter do not integrate biographical information about Defoe to the same extent as is the case with Dryden in the previous chapter, although it might have been more understandable to have reversed the case and given (perhaps) less importance to Dryden’s—and more to Defoe’s—biography and other writings. Defoe scholars will be aware, however, that a reading of Defoe’s novel and his pirate protagonist as allegorical or semi-allegorical figures would be supported by Defoe’s arguments about Robinson Crusoe as put forth in Serious Reflections, and they will be familiar with the characteristic mixing of fictional narrative and moral didacticism in most of his writings, whatever their ostensible genres, and the strong interest in trade and economy that he maintained throughout his life. As a merchant, a trader, and a writer on trade, economics, and politics, Defoe was more practised in detailing and exposing the mechanics of European mercantilism than he was concerned with developing any new form of prose fiction for purely literary purposes. We should always remember that his General History of Trade came out just six years before Robinson Crusoe, and, as Vickers says, “[i]t is in Defoe’s non-fictional tracts … that we have our most important source for our understanding of his fictional works” (3). Re-examining Defoe’s novels of the high seas within the framework that Ahmed provides is likely to provide more evidence in support of his argument, and this reviewer’s reaction after reading this chapter was a great desire to turn back to Defoe and reconsider not only Robinson Crusoe, the Farther Adventures, and Captain Singleton, but also Colonel Jack and parts of the other novels attributed to him. All in all, then, knowing that Defoe was biographically more implicated in trade and (political) moralizing than in novel writing, Ahmed’s reading of this novel will not so much shock Defoe scholars as delight them.

There is no space here for discussion of the remaining chapters in this book, but they are of equally high standard and similarly intriguing, while they continue and refine the arguments that are set out in the introduction and developed, as far as is historically relevant, in the Dryden and Defoe chapters. As mentioned in an earlier paragraph, the exciting conclusions and strong statements that Ahmed makes would sometimes be rendered more convincing if the issue of representativeness were more directly addressed in a clarification of his methodology. Related to this possible weakness is a tendency later in the book for Ahmed to move from specific and context-related instance to forceful and general statements; a particularly noticeable case in point is when Bentham’s critical stance on corrupt law and practices is taken to mean that he was “against” merchant economics as a whole (130). The weakness, such as it is, is more than compensated for by the fascinating way in which Ahmed brings together materials from diverse and sometimes little-known sources, and provides such a powerful interpretation of both the foundations of modernity and the relations between economic history and literature.

Margaret J-M. Sönmez
Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey

WORKS CITED

Lukács, Georg. The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. 1920. Trans. Anna Bostock. London: MIT Press, 1971. Print.

McKeon, Michael. The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987. Print.

Thompson, James. Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel. Durham: Duke UP, 1996. Print.

Vickers, Ilse. Defoe and the New Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Print.

Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. London: Chatto and Windus, 1957. Print.

In 1998, Paul Budra and Betty A. Schellenberg described the sequel as “an almost-predictable footnote to the narratives of Western history” (3). Almost fifteen years later, it is refreshing to encounter a book-length study that seeks to redress a persisting omission within criticism. With David A. Brewer’s The Afterlife of Character, 1726–1825, Austin shares an interest in the public’s desire for the further adventures of favorite characters, but he grounds his conclusions in studies from cognitive science which explore the effects of closure and “universal cognitive imperatives” (xv). For Austin, the pleasure of reading a sequel alongside an original almost inevitably provokes “cognitive dissonance”—a discomfort that results from perceiving contradictions between the ideas or factual claims offered in the two works. Austin’s central claim is that, in their efforts to produce a connective logic between an earlier narrative and its sequel, Europeans during the long eighteenth century replicate many of the rhetorical strategies already being employed to view the Jewish and Christian Bible as a cohesive, unified text.

In the early chapters, Austin develops the theoretical underpinnings for his study’s larger claims. In the Introduction, he clarifies precisely what he means by a “sequel”: a work which “follows another work in both narrative time and actual publication,” recognizably “incorporates characters, settings, or major concerns from the first work,” and is not considered by the author as part of the original (xi). In chapter 1, Austin does an especially strong job of not simply engaging with prominent theorists on narrative and closure (for example, Frank Kermode, D. A. Miller, and Marianna Torgovnick) but of placing them in conversation with work from cognitive and evolutionary psychology, such as Kruglanski’s work on cognitive closure. While the human brain’s adaptability to changing circumstances promotes a willingness to “revoke the closure” and critically re-examine earlier conclusions—be it the “closure” offered by a novel, a religious system, or a scientific theory—the mind simultaneously desires a final account that will resolve cognitive dissonance (10). While the book as a whole may focus on the Bible as a resource for resolving contradictory observations among eighteenth-century readers, this chapter describes a more basic set of human desires behind all cultures and myths, ranging from The Epic of Gilgamesh to the Bhagavad Gita.

In chapter 2, “God’s Sequel,” Austin delineates the “figural logic” (or “typological logic”) which was used to connect the Old and New Testament and which influenced the British eighteenth-century sequel. Austin here draws substantially from Erich Auerbach’s essay “Figura” and Paul Korshin’s Typologies in England, 1650–1820, explaining the importance of typology, in which two events (called “type scenes”) or two persons are separated by time, and the second element is interpreted as “fulfilling” the earlier first element (called a “type”). Through typology, New Testament authors (particularly in the Gospels) and later readers could re-interpret the message and earlier “ending” of the Hebrew Bible as anticipating a fulfillment in Christ. The chapter concludes by examining typological strategies employed outside the Bible, particularly the “political typologies” identifying Charles II with King David as depicted in John Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel and its successive ripostes.

In the following chapters, Austin moves from developing this theoretical framework to applying it to an analysis of several sequels and the figural logic behind each of them. Austin’s chronological account suggests that, as the rhetorical authority of the Bible becomes increasingly displaced by secularism during the period, the influence of the New Testament’s typological strategies remains long after within later sequels. In chapter 3, Austin links John Milton’s Paradise Regained with Paradise Lost in arguing that Christ is both a type of Adam and of David; Christ’s contestation with Satan ultimately hinges upon the perceived typology within the Hebrew Bible, and whether the Davidic kingdom must be fulfilled through Christ’s establishing a political (rather than spiritual) kingdom in that immediate historical moment. In chapter 4, Austin is especially concerned in answering why John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress Part Two was commercially successful when his earlier “sequel” to The Pilgrim’s Progress, Mr. Badman, was not. Austin proposes that The Pilgrim’s Progress in its two parts figurally and thematically resemble the relation between Old and New Testaments. Between its two parts, The Pilgrim’s Progress shifts its emphasis from sternness to compassion, from the individual to community, and from concealment to clarity (vii). In serving as an interpretive guide for the first work (such as interpreting Christian’s apparent “abandonment” of his family as a necessary step for their salvation), Part Two is a “true sequel” and was recognized as such by its audiences (78).

In chapter 5, Austin focuses primarily on the unifying “type scene” of massacres spanning Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and its two sequels as their connecting thread. Where critics might often dismiss the last sequel, Serious Reflections—a series of moral essays seemingly disconnected from the main narrative—as an example of economic opportunism, Austin sees it as a “crucial part” and extension of the narrative itself (82). Where the first novel introduces Crusoe’s ambivalence towards the natives, Defoe’s Farther Adventures raises new questions as Crusoe can not only invoke a biblical type-scene to condemn a massacre at Madagascar, but a competing type-scene to recommend a similar massacre against idol-worshippers. Serious Reflections helps resolve this cognitive dissonance by articulating when such massacres are “just.” In chapter 6, Austin sees in the “Pamela vogue” a transformation and secularization of the typological strategies employed in the Absalom and Achitophel event. Where Dryden and his competitors understood the biblical myths as historically true and “types” of contemporary events, “pro-Pamelists” and “anti-Pamelists” accepted Samuel Richardson’s Pamela as a fiction (that is, not historically true) to be re-narrated. This chapter considers this narration both in the sequel proper, such as with Richardson’s Pamela II and John Kelly’s competing volume Pamela’s Conduct in High Life, and in the “subversive sequels” of anti-Pamelists, such as with Henry Fielding’s Shamela and Joseph Andrews, and Eliza Haywood’s Anti-Pamela. We see a transition from the biblical David as a “type” for Charles II to Richardson’s Pamela as a “type” within later literature.

On the whole, Austin’s elaboration on figural logic offers a very illuminating lens for his chosen sequels. Though other critics have already drawn the natural analogy between the New Testament and sequels, Austin’s richer, more developed treatment makes its utility clearer and rewarding. In its incorporation of cognitive studies concerning closure, the book speaks beyond the period and region to the role of the sequel in other cultures. Austin’s search for a connective unity between a sequel and its predecessor provides some strong insights in individual sequels; his reading of Defoe’s Serious Reflections is particularly intriguing, where he explores the book’s preface—often read as Defoe’s own defense of the two novels and their “historicity”—as the words of the character. Austin thus categorizes Crusoe’s moral essays as themselves a “narrative”—for a culture whose understanding of the term differs from ours (82–83).

In some regards, our understanding of “narrative” and issues of formal diversity touch on the wider applicability of Austin’s characterizations of the “logic of the sequel.” Austin’s larger claims are ambitious, suggesting not only that figural logic “lies at the heart of the Early Modern sequel” (16) but also that many of these “rhetorical tools” persist in the sequel’s form long after they have “migrated from [their] biblical roots” (see pp. 14–15 and 124–25). For Austin, “narrative is the primary mechanism through which myths resolve contradictions” (14), and a sequel requires, by Austin’s definition, an extension in “narrative time” (xi). These remarks create a kind of tension for the title New Testaments in that, while Austin’s own New Testament interests lie with the gospel narratives (see pp. 20–22), most of the books within the New Testament are not in fact “narratives,” but didactic epistles. Similarly, since many self-described eighteenth-century “sequels” similarly lack virtually any narrative component, Austin’s model might have some limitations in its capacity to treat many poems or non-fictional prose “sequels”; Austin’s treatment of Defoe’s Serious Reflections might determine for readers whether he is ultimately successful in accommodating such texts within this “narrative” umbrella. Given Austin’s hints at his work’s relevance for a variety of sequel-genres—the Introduction even begins with a discussion of modern-day movie sequels—I could not help wondering what typological logic (with its narrative emphasis) might offer for an analysis of Restoration and eighteenth-century drama (for example, Aphra Behn’s The Rover Part 2, John Gay’s Polly, or John Vanbrugh’s The Relapse), or for primary texts which seem less overtly explicitly “Christian” in orientation than texts such as Pilgrim’s Progress, Paradise Lost, and such like. Also, although Austin does offer a few remarks on Eliza Haywood’s Anti-Pamela (just over a page), he lacks in-depth analysis of any of this period’s women sequel-writers (such as Aphra Behn or Jane Barker). This causes a missed opportunity to engage with Betty A. Schellenberg’s provocative argument that eighteenth-century sequels written by men and women differ extensively in their purposes, quality, and form (92). Given the potential scope of Austin’s claims, it would have been helpful to have seen a little more diversity in his textual selection. However, such omissions suggest room for further exploration rather than weaknesses in the argument.

This incitement to further exploration is a part of what makes reading Austin’s work so worthwhile. The “sequel” can be a difficult concept to pin down—some critics may take it essentially as chronological extension and leave it at that—and Austin offers us a thoughtful definition (see above) that can help focus future debate. Austin is interested in a specific understanding of a “sequel”; the term for him refers to a later work unanticipated by the first author and which thus must “carry the entire burden of making plausible connections between stories” (xi). Even if I am unpersuaded that Defoe’s Farther Adventures entirely fits this definition (Robinson Crusoe concludes with hints of a sequel and even summarizes much of the future sequel’s plot), whether we nuance the definition or not, Austin still raises important questions and provides engaging, reflective answers concerning what a sequel is and how it develops during this period. Ultimately, Austin’s book seeks not simply a connective logic between a sequel and its original, but a unifying logic that can make sense of the discontinuities between sequels themselves, across different cultures and eras. Austin offers a strong, coherent account of the sequels he analyzes, and his theoretical concerns (narrative theory, cognitive studies, and religious typology) broaden the work’s appeal to different potential audiences. Austin provides a very valuable approach for looking at the eighteenth-century sequel and leaves room to explore its wider applicability; ultimately, Austin’s account is not simply about providing us with some sense of “closure” in our understanding of the sequel, but also prompting our continued cognitive imperative to revisit old questions, explore new directions, and suspend our sense of an ending.

John C. Traver
California State University-Chico

WORKS CITED

Auerbach, Erich. “Figura.” 1938. Scenes from the Drama of European Literature. Trans. Ralph Manheim. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. Print.

Brewer, David A. The Afterlife of Character, 1726–1825. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2005. Print.

Budra, Paul, and Betty A. Schellenberg, eds. Part Two: Reflections on the Sequel. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1998. Print.

Korshin, Paul. Typologies in England, 1650–1820. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982. Print.

Schellenberg, Betty A. “‘To Renew Their Former Acquaintance’: Print, Gender, and Some Eighteenth-Century Sequels.” Part Two: Reflections on the Sequel. Ed. Paul Budra and Betty A. Schellenberg. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1998. Print.

Paula Backscheider’s most recent book is, by a wide margin, the best study of Elizabeth Singer Rowe that has yet been written. But to praise the book in such terms is to understate its range. Consider a paragraph appearing on page 111. “Rowe,” the paragraph begins,

addresses most of the problems and situations faced by women in the stories of the women writers of the 1720s, but one marked contrast is that she omits or elides the implications and sometimes prolonged suffering of women entrapped by a tyrannical father or husband or suddenly impoverished and on their own. Her heroines are not maimed as Aubin’s are; women are not married to rapists as Davys’s are, fighting feelings of freakishness as Barker’s are, or experiencing the “resolutions” in Haywood’s fiction, as exemplified by The British Recluse and The Rash Resolve.

Backscheider proceeds to describe J. Paul Hunter’s contention, in Before Novels, that early novels took up concerns previously addressed by a “lost tradition” of oral narrative. She brings the paragraph to a close by rejecting this point: “Traditions, however, are never lost; we just temporarily lose our ability to follow the thread” (111). Her objective in this ambitious study is to recover Elizabeth Singer Rowe’s necessary place in the unspooling of the English novel. Her method is everywhere contextualizing and often, as in the above passage, analogical. As she situates Rowe’s fiction within an array of literary forms and genres, and aligns Rowe’s cultural authority with far-reaching social movements, Backscheider accumulates comparisons between her subject and other writers (especially women writers) who are more familiar to twenty-first-century readers. She likewise accumulates references to other scholars, as the notes, bibliography, and index to this volume readily attest. From the first paragraph of the book, in which she quotes from articles by Sharon Achinstein and Norma Clarke, to the last, where she quotes Stuart Curran, Backscheider orients her claims to the language of other critics who have worked on Rowe and her world, the eighteenth-century novel, and women’s literary history. Backscheider establishes the scholarly record in the process of superseding it.

The basis for Backscheider’s argument is properly bibliographical. She contends that in the 1730s, the “absolute low point of the production of new novels, histories, and romances” in Britain (2), Rowe began publishing works that not only revitalized moribund forms (amatory fiction, epistolary narratives, and loose collections of tales, in particular), but also reinvented novelistic discourse, taming its language and unifying its contradictions with a “new non-patriarchal ideology” and a “controlling narrative sensibility” (124, 126). Textual support for such claims comes primarily from the four volumes of Rowe’s epistolary fiction. These volumes were first published together in 1734 and then throughout the eighteenth century as Friendship in Death in Twenty Letters from the Dead to the Living. To which are added, Letters Moral and Entertaining, in Prose and Verse, in Three Parts. Backscheider refers to this collection simply as Letters, and she leads with the stunning fact that “by 1825, there had been at least seventy-nine editions of Rowe’s Letters, and by 1840, eighty-nine” (2). By the numbers alone, Backscheider succeeds in identifying Rowe as a writer with whom serious students of the novel must reckon.

The introductory chapter’s admirable synthesis of biographical accounts brings out Rowe’s friendship with Frances Thynne Seymour, Countess of Hertford and later Duchess of Somerset. As the book unfolds, this friendship, seen in tandem with the other relationships it helped to facilitate, increasingly defines the career of a writer most often described as a recluse. (At one point, in fact, and rather too cursorily, Backscheider acknowledges that “Hertford may have collaborated with Rowe throughout the Letters” [93].) The first two chapters treat Rowe in relation to the genres that shaped English prose fiction during the second two decades of the eighteenth century. Amatory fiction, apparition literature, and patchworks (sometimes called “olios” after “a heavily spiced stew of meat and vegetables” [69]) come in for sustained attention in chapter 2, and chapter 3 is devoted exclusively to fairy tales (“defined by their plot trajectory rather than the inclusion of fairies” [87]). In each instance Backscheider depicts Rowe as a bold experimenter who opened up new possibilities for the novel.

Chapter 4 pursues this case in more abstract terms. Here Rowe is said to have created a newly unified narrative sensibility, using interpolated poetry to “neutralize” gendered authority (132) and taking strategic advantage of her contemporary reputation to correlate aesthetic production and reception. “Rowe’s most artistic composition,” Backscheider asserts, “was her lifestyle and constructed identity, and she uses the same methods repeatedly to construct characters and passes them on to her readers” (161). The characters exchanging letters in this unapologetically ideological fiction, in other words, are at work fashioning selves, and their qualities “duplicate those [Rowe] was known to have” (153). Rowe’s epistolary fiction, then, presupposes as well as distributes her independent and harmonious way of life. Accordingly, in one of the book’s most persuasive arguments, the fifth chapter maintains that Rowe initiated an alternative politeness movement for women. Rowe’s Letters serve as a “technology” of this movement, helping readers do what Rowe and many of her novelistic characters do: cultivate self-discipline and build up a revisionary domestic economy, an “elsewhere of imagination” (188) that can eventually sustain a “subaltern counterpublic” (201). In the short run, Rowe cleared the way for such works as Mary Collyer’s Felicia to Charlotte (1744), Sarah Fielding’s Adventures of David Simple (1744), and Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall (1762). In the longer run, as Backscheider’s conclusion demonstrates, she forged a legacy that was taken up by the Bluestockings. This discussion of “congruences” (218) between Rowe and the Bluestockings is especially illuminating on the significance of outdoor walks, the challenges of public passion, and the implications of the “feminization of politeness” (234).

Backscheider sorts through a dizzying amount of material along the way, seeming to desire total contextualization. Readers will therefore wonder at times which of the classifications or innovations proposed for Rowe stand out as the most significant. Epistolarity provides a dominant interpretive category throughout, but none of the genres or subgenres mentioned above reaches clear priority over the others. The author’s analogies intensify this challenge. At different points in chapter 1, for instance, the reader will find Rowe compared to Addison, Richardson, Haywood, Behn, Defoe, Gildon, Manley, Austen, Barker, and Davys. By no means can one examine the prose that Rowe both inherits and reworks without reference to other novelists—her predecessors, contemporaries, and heirs—and Backscheider knows this terrain better than anyone else. The sheer abundance of these comparisons, however, tends to normalize more than distinguish Rowe’s achievement. The comparative approach also puts pressure on Backscheider’s own contention that Rowe’s fictional writings should be seen as “‘pivotal,’ more dramatically different than transitional texts” (39). This distinction between pivotal and transitional hovers over the entire book (see for instance 44–45, 124, 155, 161, 170, 194) and appears fraught at moments when Backscheider refers to her subject as “a key transitional adapter” or observes that she “fill[ed] a gap between the fiction of the 1720s and the Richardson era” (121, 231). No sensible reader can come away from this book doubting that Rowe was an influential transitional figure in the history of the English novel. Yet even though I am persuaded, and even though Backscheider has mounted the strongest case I can imagine, there will surely be those who disagree that she was a transformative figure and who will prefer to say that Rowe reformed prose fiction rather than “revolutionized” it (231).

Even admiring readers can retain some distance, that is, from an author’s point of view. It is one of the great virtues of this book that Backscheider accounts for the attractiveness of Rowe’s life story as an indispensable feature of her fiction’s appeal for its first audiences. “Rowe herself became a text,” Backscheider urges early on, “to be read and imitated” (3), and she insists in her conclusion that dissenters of Rowe’s ilk saw people as “the authors of their own lives, their historians and interpreters” (221). Lives as well as texts can be misread, however. Indeed, the introductory chapter shows in exemplary bibliographical detail that by the beginning of the nineteenth century publishers had skilfully solidified a misleading new image of Rowe, a profoundly selective portrait of a death-obsessed devotional poet “associated with evangelicals, enthusiasts, and mystics” (35). Whether we like it or not, Rowe invited some of these characterizations, and they too represent part of her legacy. Piety still sells, at least here in the USA, and perhaps it was this sort of otherworldly author for whom many eighteenth-century readers clamored and whose identity they partially constructed. By presenting instead a novelist who remade her audience in the sensible image of herself and her characters, Backscheider succeeds in securing Rowe’s agency as an embodied woman writer, but she seems to undersell the agency of those early readers and thus the impact of the “reading revolution.”

Elizabeth Singer Rowe and the Development of the English Novel has already indicated its reply to this small concern. If traditions are never lost, then Backscheider has restored our attention to a fundamental truth that was there all along: we cannot follow the thread of the English novel without making sense of Elizabeth Singer Rowe. This book has recovered afresh the loveliness and bravura of Rowe’s accomplishments, the fictions of her life and the life of her fictions. What twenty-first-century readers will do with these insights—what tools they will take from Paula Backscheider’s monumental achievement—is now up to them.

Dustin D. Stewart
University of Colorado at Colorado Springs

WORKS CITED

Hunter, J. Paul. Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990. Print.

Beyond its brief introduction, John Bender’s Ends of Enlightenment contains nothing new. Instead, it is a collection of ten separate articles and book chapters – some co-written, all previously published – from as early as 1987 and as recently as 2010. While it is unfortunate, or at least curious, that Bender does not revisit or revise some of his conclusions in light of more recent and sometimes more sophisticated interpretive trends, the book does testify to the impressively interdisciplinary breadth of his scholarly expertise; as a broad compendium of his various projects, it also exposes a number of subtending thematic continuities in his own thought and thus raises new and important questions concerning the connections and correlations among his apparently disparate subjects. Its strength, in other words, is its novel organization of his established conclusions. This is an almost performative illustration of the basic hypothesis that informs the whole book, namely, that intellectual systems are not logically prior to the substance they organize, but rather that modes and objects of thought are mutually constitutive: the organization of knowledge implicates, even determines, its effects.

The few new pages that open Ends of Enlightenment situate this hypothesis with respect to Bender’s long-standing scholarly agenda: to bring contemporary critical strategies to bear upon Enlightenment texts and the social formations they developed in order to incorporate the early novel into the pantheon of practical philosophy. To this end, he fashions himself after both David Hume and Michel Foucault. He is a self-described “skeptical historicist” whose use of empirical evidence frames the past “in the manner of the vignette rather than of the grand narrative” (17). Bender’s, in other words, is a postmodern Enlightenment, which is to say, an Enlightenment reconceived not as a unified historical event but as a set of discrete, sometimes overlapping, and often contradictory narratives, most of them emerging in the eighteenth century and all of them orbiting around a common crisis of authority brought about by that period’s epochal destabilization of traditional structures of knowledge and power. Hume receives extensive treatment in the following chapters, but the clear methodological resonance with Foucault’s work and legacy is only briefly noted; like his earlier Imagining the Penitentiary, Bender explains, some of the essays in this new collection “were written under the sign of Foucault” (15) – in the same critical spirit, we might say, if not always according to the same investigative tactics or with Foucault’s overtly political implications. Be that as it may, this is a welcome articulation of the value for eighteenth-century scholarship of what Bender (following Diderot) calls “contemporaneity” (3–4), and a reminder of the restrictions that the field’s often antiquarian sensibilities can impose against its potential relevance to the present.

In addition to these primary influences, and despite an extensive range of scholarly sources, a short list of contemporary texts orients Bender’s various lines of inquiry. The several chapters concerning the historical correlation between the rise of modern science and the rise of the novel all lean upon the notion of “virtual witnessing” developed in Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-Pump; his account of the emergence of rational deliberation as a basic principle of social organization closely follows Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (without, however, accounting for Foucault’s famous disagreement with Habermas, which leaves us to wonder whether and how Bender conceives of his work as an implicit synthesis of the two); Dorrit Cohn’s Transparent Minds orients his claims concerning the epistemological stakes of the early novel and the emergence of free indirect discourse; and behind much of this is a tacit and deferential elaboration of Ian Watt’s basic premises joining empiricism with narrative realism in The Rise of the Novel. Indeed, these texts appear so regularly that in some cases the same passages are quoted in one chapter and the next, the same concepts defined and then severally repeated. This reminder of the text’s inherent disunity and absence of revision seems both unfortunate and unnecessary, although they do demonstrate a deep conceptual consistency.

Such consistency is not always patent, however, and requires that the reader establish and develop connections, or at times discern possible contradictions, across these essays. Example: the first chapter, which originally appeared in Clifford Siskin and William Warner’s recent collection, This Is Enlightenment, follows Watt’s notion of “realism of assessment” by tracing the development not only of empiricism (Watt’s primary concern), but more specifically of inductive scientific reasoning, from Bacon, Newton, and Boyle to Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Here, Bender quotes Samuel Richardson describing to a friend the “Air of Genuineness” with which he wished to imbue his Clarissa, and borrows Catherine Gallagher’s term “ironic credulity” to characterize how Richardson places his reader “on a skeptical knife-edge between acceptance of his novelistic letters as real and awareness that they are fictions” (30–31). In other words, Richardson wanted to compose a novel that was false but also probable, thereby illustrating and popularizing the growing power of what Bender calls “surrogate observation” (28) to truth claims in the eighteenth century. Now, the same passage from Clarissa appears just ten pages later in chapter 2, the topic of which is (relatedly) the early novel and the history of the scientific method. This time, however, Richardson is quoted in the context of Hume’s notorious skepticism from his Treatise on Human Nature; in lieu of ironic credulity, Bender now calls Richardson’s fiction a “provisional reality” (41). Far from consolidating the new hegemony of the scientific method, novels like Clarissa posed a major threat to scientific authority and its assertions of material truth by revealing that, if strategically framed, any testimony to scientific fact might really be a work of fiction.

Certainly, both claims can be true: Clarissa could reflect and reify the formal demands of inductive reasoning – of ascending from particular observations to general truths – and, precisely because it so effectively mimics this scientific frame, expose the potential for untruth intrinsic to every translation from the laboratory to the public. If this is so, it falls to the reader to reach such conclusions and to work out their implications. So be it. But this analytic gap also raises questions about theoretical consistency. Does the concept of ironic credulity not at least complicate that of provisional reality, or are they mere synonyms? Is Hume’s link between probability and uncertainty really commensurate with Richardson’s ironic “skeptical knife-edge” strategy? Is the oppositional articulation of science and fiction across the eighteenth century at odds with the latter’s instrumental role in validating the new empiricism? If so, are there perhaps two competing tendencies in the early novel, one validating science and the other radically undermining its epistemological foundations?

Chapter 5, “The Novel as Modern Myth,” further indicates why these are far from rhetorical questions. Bender groups Robinson Crusoe, Frankenstein, and Dracula together and speculates that their lasting power may result from their “stylistic vaporization” – their use of verisimilitude to erase the fact of their historicity, the fact that they are recent fabrications, such that here fiction reflects or refracts reality in ways that essentially mirror the power and social function of myth. On this view, these “metanovels – modern myths – in their revelation of unreality within the real” (107) continue to captivate because of the exceptional degree to which they “enable us to assume, through surrogate projection, the illusion of sharing the firsthand experience of others” (106). This is an intriguing idea, to be sure, and one which Bender claims would install the gothic novel as the paradigm of novelistic discourse as such – but which again begs the question of narrative realism’s relation to scientific truth. For if these novels, these paragons of realism, attain the status of myth not despite their realism but because they are so nearly real, then what does this reveal about the early novel’s filiation with the rise of materialism, naturalism, and induction? Would this imply a mythology at the heart of scientific knowledge, or at least of its contemporary valorization? What would this mean for the very idea of truth, after its Enlightenment iteration? Again, the strength of Ends of Enlightenment is its capacity to provoke such questions; its weakness, however, is that the essays collected here are largely preliminary – understandable for a stand-alone article or book chapter – and therefore evade the deeper conceptual precision that one would expect from a complete volume.

Despite these drawbacks, the theoretically preliminary chapters prove useful to establishing the grid of historical phenomena into which Bender can install his more patient readings of specific texts. Chapter 4 (co-written with Robin Valenza) considers Hume’s reasons for trading the technical philosophical precision of his Treatise on Human Nature for the less sophisticated but more popular style of his later essays and Enquiries, and evaluates what is lost in the translation from a specialized discourse into the “conversible world” of the new public sphere. The earlier chapters outlining the strategies by which experimental science dealt with the same problem of maintaining intellectual rigor while also convincing a general public of the validity of its experimental results provide an excellent general background against which this specific, and especially compelling, case is illuminated.

Chapter 3 clusters William Hogarth’s experimental aesthetic sensibility apropos of non-human objects, Habermas’s position on the value of experiment to the emergence of a rational public sphere, and Martin Heidegger’s notion of “facticity.” The last of these is a rather clumsy addition – facticity and instrumental rationality are far from consistent; the only footnote to Heidegger’s work refers readers to Being and Time in its entirety, a citation which is, to say the least, not helpful; and the argument seems to gain nothing from this ontological intrusion. But pairing Hogarth with Habermas does paint a clear image of Habermas’s version of Enlightenment, which clarifies later chapters addressing novelistic contributions to this culture of rational deliberation, idealized though it may be. This prepares the claim in chapter 6 that Tom Jones “is governed by an ideal of intelligent, broadly educated sociability that lies at the heart of Fielding’s achievement as an author no less than of the eighteenth century itself” (116). These two chapters also lay the groundwork for the volume’s final essay, a collaboration with David E. Wellbery which considers the resurgence of rhetoric in the twentieth century, after the Enlightenment’s communicative rationalism had rendered its classical form obsolete.

Chapters 7 and 8, on Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield and William Godwin’s Caleb Williams, respectively, nuance the theoretical framework Bender first developed in Imagining the Penitentiary, but also exemplify the skeptical historicism outlined above: both essays excavate in each novel a tension between its apparent, explicit ideological commitments and the emergent ideologies, especially of modern subjectivity and its attendant mechanisms of social control, to which the texts unknowingly contribute. Chapter 9 reveals a similar tension in Choderlos de Laclos’s Les liaisons dangereuses between an increasingly archaic use of love as a means of acquiring social status and a new ideal of romantic love, though here this tension is the organizing principle around which the novel’s whole plot circulates, and not, as in the other novels, an accident of historical myopia.

This brief, necessarily fragmentary summary perhaps indicates the chief difficulty that Ends of Enlightenment presents to its readers. On the one hand, almost all the essays are thoughtful, provocative, and worth reading, separately or together; on the other hand, and because they were never meant to form a unified work, their reproduction here introduces new problems, questions, tensions, and occasional confusions. While elaborating his operative notion of contemporaneity, Bender writes that “Enlightenment repeated itself in the twentieth century and is doing so still today, but with the differences inevitably present in return and with the productive dissonance that belated repetition entails” (4). Ends of Enlightenment, too, is a differential repetition – at times belated, at times dissonant, but ultimately productive. Even the title announces a plurality of possible conclusions, objectives, or limits to the idea and reality of Enlightenment. Throughout, the book demands that we contend with the ambiguities and inconsistencies that a skeptical historicism means to uncover, though not to resolve.

Nathan Gorelick
Utah Valley University

WORKS CITED

Bender, John. Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. Print.

Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Representing Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978. Print.

Gallagher, Catherine. “The Rise of Fictionality.” The Novel. 2 vols. Ed. Franco Moretti. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006. 1:336–63. Print.

Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. 1962. Trans. Thomas Burger. Cambridge: Polity P, 1989. Print.

Shapin, Steven, and Simon Schaffer. Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985. Print.

Siskin, Clifford, and William Warner, ed. This is Enlightenment. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010. Print.

Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. London: Chatto and Windus, 1957. Print.

Zouheir Jamoussi allows in his opening sentence that the “temptation” to compare Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift is not new, which suggests that others have considered but rejected this attractive but perhaps risky enterprise. James Sutherland’s oft-told tale, a tale always worth repeating, may sound an appropriate note of caution for anyone considering placing these particular authors into the same space. According to Sutherland, Robert Harley understood the diplomatic necessity of keeping his foremost press propagandists apart from one another to the extent that “as Swift walked up by the front door Defoe was being let out quietly by the back” (Sutherland 185). Jamoussi’s title, The Snare in the Constitution, would appear inadvertently to underscore the wisdom of a tentative approach to comparative treatments of his subjects. Jamoussi’s caution, however, proves to be the trap in his otherwise thoughtful and comprehensive study of these famously contrarian writers.

Jamoussi cites two book-length treatments that have compared these authors since the publication of John F. Ross’s Swift and Defoe: A Study in Relationship (1941). J. A. Downie’s Robert Harley and the Press: Propaganda and Public Opinion in the Age of Swift and Defoe (1979) analyzes Harley’s professionalization of journalism as a tool for government propaganda. Carol Houlihan Flynn’s The Body in Swift and Defoe (1990) addresses the “epistemological bind of the age, the confinement of thought to matter” (1). Both studies, in other words, fulfil the promises of their titles. Jamoussi argues that Defoe and Swift grappled with a “snare,” a root-problem, that they believed bedevilled the political, religious, and psychological constitution of their world. He explains that he opted for the concept of liberty from this snare as enabling the most comprehensive and inclusive approach to their prolific and generically varied literary production. The main problem of Jamoussi’s study is that its encyclopedic narrative of events and historiographical interpretation of texts threaten to obscure any argument that he may be making of his own. In his introduction, Jamoussi deplores anachronistic twenty-first-century attitudes toward eighteenth-century practices such as slavery and declares an ambition to recover the contemporary perspective. This could be useful to discussions of Defoe’s Crusoe as empire-building Englishman or of Gulliver’s Yahoos and Swift’s Irish experience, chiming with other postcolonial critiques such as Srinivas Aravamudan’s Tropicopolitans (1999) and Enlightenment Orientalism (2012) or Daniel Carey’s “Reading Contrapuntally: Robinson Crusoe, Slavery, and Postcolonial Theory” (2009). Jamoussi promises to add to such critical reassessment but this perspective becomes largely lost as his study progresses.

The greater part of the book follows a steady and persuasive strategy of relating works to their historical context. On the one hand, Jamoussi’s scrupulously fair-minded treatment ensures a clear narrative of the polarized see-saw politics of Dissenter and Episcopalian, Whig and Tory. On the other hand, the approach can frustrate progress as when, for example, Jamoussi balances and calibrates the differing attitudes held by Swift and Defoe toward Charles I’s regicide, a pattern of excessive checks and balances that continues throughout the book. The perceived ideological and literary differences of these two authors may well offer themselves as useful tools for undergraduate discussion of early eighteenth-century culture wars, but it is an approach that reinforces a rather simplistic, binary structure of thought. Whether Harley was Machiavellian or simply pat at comic timing, it becomes still more entertaining to realize that he also hired John Toland, the outspoken deist who was probably despised by Defoe and Swift in equal measure. I imagine Harley hastily closeting Toland below the staircase in the hall, Harry Potter-like, before he ushers Defoe out and Swift in. Jamoussi similarly peoples his book with voices that jostle and conflict or, as he prefers to put it, “are juxtaposed and made to respond to each other.” His critical self-effacement has the advantage of ensuring that his featured authors do “speak for themselves” (16) as Freethinker Toland, High Church Henry Sacheverell, and non-juror Charles Leslie extend heated arguments past the conventions of Dissenter Defoe and Anglican Swift. Certainly, Jamoussi offers a very useful introduction to the political and religious networks of affiliation shaken and stirred by the 1688 Williamite Revolution.

Jamoussi’s discussion of religious liberties moves seamlessly into the question of civil liberties. There is no danger of under-representation as Jamoussi trawls contributions ranging from James Harrington’s Oceana (1656) to James Thomson’s Liberty (1735–36). G. A. Starr makes an observation in his edition of Religious Courtship (1722) that Defoe was discomfited by the term “liberty” as it was “fraught with difficulty” and was often “invoked in bad causes” (Defoe 294). Jamoussi draws attention to intellectual and ideological anomalies that may have created difficulty for Defoe and Swift. Defoe’s adulation of William III as England’s savior, for example, all but invokes a divine aspect that he frequently condemned in the doctrine of a divine right of kings. Principles of religious and civil liberties certainly became more complex and confused as Defoe and Swift grappled with English governance of Ireland and Scotland. As he worked for Harley in Scotland, Defoe sought to bypass popular hostility to the Union through dialogue with Tory landowners and Episcopalian Dissenters, quite opposite to his position within the English nation. Swift may have enjoyed popular acclaim as an “Irish Patriot” for his campaign against suspect English coinage in Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), but his primary grievance remained that the English authorities treated the Anglo-Irish as Irish subjects even though they were the descendants of those original English who had conquered and subdued the native Irish population.

Defoe and Swift received pay to promote government interests in their journals, the Review and the Examiner. They also suffered government reprisals for their manipulations of public opinion, as with Defoe’s The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702) and Swift’s Drapier’s Letters. In light of their preference for print camouflage and misdirection, the role of authorial anonymity receives surprisingly brief treatment in Jamoussi’s study. It is even more odd that Jamoussi should draw upon A General History of the Pyrates (1724–28) for quotations from “Defoe” with not a whisper of its reattribution to Captain Charles Johnson (though, without wishing to rekindle controversy, I welcome such natural acceptance of Defoe’s authorship). Also without irony, Jamoussi cites Defoe’s promotion of authorial responsibility through enforced legal attribution in An Essay on the Regulation of the Press (1704). Perhaps, though, this is meant to be The Shortest Way to demonstrate Defoe’s lasting reputation for saying one thing while meaning another. The contemporary author of Judas Discover’d (1713) had no trouble in denouncing Defoe as “a thorough-pac’d, true-bred Hypocrite, an High-Church Man one Day, and a Rank Whig the next.”

Sometimes it may seem that Jamoussi is so prepared to maintain his air of studied neutrality that he will incorporate somebody else’s literature review of a topic. However, his deployment of Robert Mahony’s critical history of Swift as “Irish Patriot” unexpectedly heralds Jamoussi’s arrival on the field of critical battle. Jamoussi makes short work of Carole Fabricant’s suggestion that Swift actually welcomed his return to Ireland for the opportunity to renew old ties. Jamoussi agrees, though, that there is more to Swift’s life in Ireland than a campaign of petty revenge against Walpole and the Whigs, driven by the disappointments of his clerical and literary ambitions. Instead, he celebrates Swift’s rage at exile amongst slaves for triggering “one of the most decisive turning points in his political and literary career” (153). The Snare in the Constitution is always more engaging when Jamoussi lets slip his own point of view. It is fascinating to follow the author’s progress from mild critical dissension—“John Richetti is possibly wrong” (306)—to full-tilt battle with George Starr, David Blewett, J. Paul Hunter, and Maximillian Novak. The difference in tone in the latter part of his study—confident, authoritative, and stimulating—may be explained by a footnote that sources much of his material in an earlier monograph, La Liberté dans L’Oeuvre de Defoe: entre la realité et la fiction (2001). As he settles into the fictional works, clearly his first love, Jamoussi’s style becomes far more relaxed and liberated. From an exploration of Defoe’s “entanglements of movement and meaning” to an analysis of Gulliver’s progression through boxes, from farmer’s crate to bespoke luxury to eagle-tossed drop in the ocean, Jamoussi radiates an enthusiasm that would spur readers at any level of interest or expertise to pick up Defoe and Swift and read afresh. It is as though after supplying all the dutiful fruits of contextual and critical history, the book may finally begin.

There is much to recommend this well-organized and comprehensive study, which provides an invaluable resource for contemporary debates on constitutional and religious liberties, press freedoms, the lures and traps of money and trade, and the speculative attractions of literary fiction. In Jamoussi’s assessment, Defoe and Swift both recognized and tackled a “constitutional snare” that hobbled modern hopes and fears of “liberty.” What was a terminus for Swift, however, was the starting point for Defoe. Swift loses hope but Defoe holds faith in human invention and progress. However, despite the standard dualistic reading of Defoe’s modern optimism and Swift’s preference for a classical past, Jamoussi’s closing sentence suggests that Swift’s passion for universal justice above narrow national interest makes his work “particularly appealing to large sections of world public opinion in these difficult times” (409). This bold statement excites new and interesting questions but then the page falls blank. Professor Jamoussi surely has much more to say and this ending would make a good beginning.

Christopher Borsing
Trinity College Dublin

WORKS CITED

Aravamudan, Srinivas. Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2012. Print.

– – –. Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804. Durham: Duke UP, 1999. Print.

Carey, Daniel. “Reading Contrapuntally: Robinson Crusoe, Slavery, and Postcolonial Theory.” The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory. Ed. Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Print.

Defoe, Daniel. Religious Courtship. Ed. G. A. Starr. Religious and Didactic Writings of Daniel Defoe. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006. Print.

Downie, J. A. Robert Harley and the Press: Propaganda and Public Opinion in the Age of Swift and Defoe. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979. Print.

Fabricant, Carole. Swift’s Landscape. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982. Print.

Flynn, Carol Houlihan. The Body in Swift and Defoe. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. Print.

Jamoussi, Zouheir. La Liberté dans l’oeuvre de Defoe: entre la realité et la fiction. Tunis: Centre de Publication Universitaire, 2001. Print.

Ross, John F. Swift and Defoe: A Study in Relationship. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1941. Print.

Sutherland, James. Defoe. 1937. London: Methuen, 1971. Print.

For a writer as prolific as Daniel Defoe, sequels seem like inevitable literary industrial by-products, the tailings left behind after the extraction of superior narratives. Ian Watt said as much in his dismissal of the sequels to The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719)—The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe (1720)—in the work that secured Defoe’s place in the canon, The Rise of the Novel (1957). Though many critics followed Watt in disregarding the sequels, interest in understanding Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe books as a trilogy has increased markedly in the last fifteen years. Critical approaches to the sequels supplied two well-attended panels at the 2013 meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, as well as ample justification for John Richetti and Rivka Swenson’s forthcoming Broadview Press edition of the second book in the series, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. In the wake of this uptick in scholarly interest, Virginia La Grand’s A Spectacular Failure: Robinson Crusoe I, II, III seems timely but fails to incorporate recent scholarship. La Grand contributes valuable insights by taking an innovative linguistic approach to the material. The first three chapters lay out the historical contexts for reading the series, the first in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the second during Defoe’s time, and the third as part of Defoe’s oeuvre. In chapters four through eight, La Grand demonstrates the way pamphlets on and abridged versions of the novels reveal a popular interpretation of Crusoe’s morals that Defoe did not intend, and which he definitively contradicted in Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe. Her final chapter concludes that despite the sequels, Defoe never regained control of the Crusoe story. She notes that even in Thomas Gent’s 1722 version—which incorporated events from all three books—the moral derives from the island sequence, making it a triumphant story of individualism, rather than a parable of the necessity of trade. La Grand’s ease with German allows her to bring in previously obscure secondary sources, and she can be a close, careful reader of primary texts, but overall the book feels strangely hermetic, referencing none of the recent studies that would provide context for her argument.

The “spectacular failure” of the title derives directly from the theoretical framework La Grand employs. La Grand uses discourse analysis, particularly Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson’s concept of relevance, to understand the Crusoe series as speech acts. Relevance Theory contends that the comprehension of speech acts requires contextual cues, particularly echoic speech. When repeated the same utterance can mean total agreement with the speaker or total disagreement, a difference easily detected in oral communication, or signaled in writing by shifts in persona. This is the heart of irony, a mode which produced unsettling results for Defoe. La Grand explains:

Compared to other writers of his day, Defoe did not always give his readers clues to his ironic intention by changing voices in the texts that he claimed to be ironic. The convention of anonymous publication prevented readers from inferring his irony from his identity. Fast readers misread him. Again and again, these readers felt tricked by Defoe. Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory provides a framework for addressing the confusion between author and narrator that plagued Defoe. (28)

To gauge the extent of this misreading La Grand combines the tools of contemporary socio-linguistic theory with careful study of the views of Defoe’s contemporary audience as represented in pamphlets and abridgements of The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. La Grand concludes that Defoe uses the sequels as correctives to pirated versions of the original, which he thought omitted too much of the religious content, and uses the Serious Reflections in particular to counter Charles Gildon’s critique in his 1719 pamphlet, The Life and Strange and Surprizing Adventures of Mr. D— De F–. In her examination of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century abridgements, La Grand contends that Defoe’s intended interpretation of Crusoe’s adventures was eclipsed by those of his critics and editors. Of particular interest to those of us who do not read German, this section leans heavily on Erhard Dahl’s study of the first century of English editions of Robinson Crusoe, Die Kürzungen des “Robinson Crusoe” in England zwischen 1719 und 1819 vor dem Hintergrund des zeitgenössischen Druckgewerbes, Verlagswesens und Lesepublikums (1977). Despite the durability of Defoe’s premise as a meme, La Grand judges the series a failure as a speech act.

La Grand contends that The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe and Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe promote Defoe’s vision for England’s international trade in ways that could easily be cropped from abridgments of the first novel, which tend to favor the island sequence. Taken on its own, the island sequence gives readers Crusoe as a heroic model of self-sufficiency, inconsistent with the “naïve observer . . . [whose] suffering is more ridiculous than pathetic” that La Grand identifies in The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (95–96). Thus, Defoe’s messages about the unerring voice of Providence and the necessity of trade were lost both on his contemporary audience and the generations that came later, raised on ever more condensed versions of Crusoe’s story.

Classifying the Crusoe books as speech acts rather than approaching them solely as literary texts allows La Grand to judge their communicative efficacy without slipping into the mire of authorial intent. According to La Grand, Defoe deploys levels of irony in the Crusoe series that eluded both the critical and popular audience for his work. After laying out her methods in the first chapter and giving a brief background in eighteenth-century print culture in the second, in the third chapter La Grand discusses Defoe’s most famously misread work, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702). This discussion does not really pay off until chapter eight, where it leads to La Grand’s most tantalizing suggestion: that like The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters, Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe is, at least in part, an exercise in provocative irony. She gives her section discussing “Of the Proportion between the Christian and Pagan World” the title, “The Shortest Way with the Pagans.” In La Grand’s reading, conflating Crusoe’s persona with his creator’s is just as dangerous in Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe as in The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters, though no one would have pilloried Defoe for suggesting a crusade-like invasion of Japan in 1720. Crusoe is not Defoe’s avatar but his drone. Defoe uses Crusoe as a problem-seeking missile, and, in La Grand’s view, the solutions he pronounces in Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe must be understood as the product of Crusoe’s spiritual weakness catalogued in first two volumes (202). La Grand, by analyzing Crusoe’s narrative voice throughout the series as similar to the ironic “written speech act” Defoe deploys in The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters, argues that he presents Crusoe as a monitory—not an exemplary—Englishman.

As this précis makes clear, La Grand intersects with many contentious points in the conversation around the Crusoe series. La Grand underlines the way the Crusoe books represent Defoe’s position on international trade and stresses that one should read the Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe as the product of the fictional Robinson Crusoe, not of Defoe himself. La Grand enters these debates without referring once to Robert Markley or Maximillian Novak, critics who have multiple publications wrestling with these same issues. Acknowledging Markley and Novak would certainly help in framing her argument, but other scholarship La Grand neglects would catch her completely flat-footed. George Starr’s reading of Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe in his introduction to the Pickering and Chatto edition poses significant challenges to La Grand’s claim that the book is written from a consistent fictional persona. In addition, Melissa Free’s 2006 essay, “Un-Erasing Crusoe: Farther Adventures in the Nineteenth Century,” directly contradicts La Grand’s claim that The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe simply “fell out of circulation” (La Grand 165). Free’s meticulous study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editions demonstrates that it was not until the twentieth century that The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe was definitively separated from The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.

La Grand’s A Spectacular Failure is the first book-length study of Defoe’s Crusoe series, a frustratingly obscure topic until the last few decades. Unfortunately, she approaches the sequels as if they were still obscure. La Grand’s methods and conclusions, while intriguing, feel unfinished, unfurnished by the thoughtful work Defoe’s sequels have begun to inspire.

Margaret France
Augustana College

WORKS CITED

Dahl, Erhard. Die Kürzungen des “Robinson Crusoe” in England zwischen 1719 und 1819 vor dem Hintergrund des zeitgenössischen Druckgewerbes, Verlagswesens und Lesepublikums. Frankfurt-am-Main: Peter Lang, 1977. Print.

Free, Melissa. “Un-Erasing Crusoe: Farther Adventures in the Nineteenth Century.” Book History 9 (2006): 89–130. Print.

Markley, Robert. The Far East And The English Imagination, 1600–1730. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. Print.

—. “‘I Have Now Done with My Island and All Manner of Discourse about It’: Crusoe’s Farther Adventures and the Unwritten History of the Novel.” A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture. Ed. Paula R. Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. 25–47.

—.“Teaching the Crusoe Trilogy.” Approaches to Teaching Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe.” Ed. Maximillian E. Novak and Carl Fisher. New York: MLA, 2005. 96–104.

Novak, Maximillian E. Daniel Defoe: Master Of Fictions: His Life And Ideas. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. Print.

Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. Print.

Starr, G. A. “Introduction.” Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Ed. G. A. Starr. The Novels of Daniel Defoe. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008. Print.

Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. 1957. Berkeley: U of California P, 2001. Print.

The Man That Never Was is John Martin’s second biography of Daniel Defoe. His first, Beyond Belief: The Real Life of Daniel Defoe, received mixed reviews for its provocative and often unorthodox view of the life and works of Defoe. The point that Martin returns to in this second biography is that Defoe’s year of birth was unknown until he discovered the writer’s birth record, which indicates that the writer was born in 1644, some fifteen or sixteen years before his supposed birth year of 1659/1660. Martin also pursued this claim in another book on Defoe: Alien Come Home: The Story of Daniel Defoe’s Missing Years, 1644–1680.

In The Man That Never Was, Martin claims that Defoe was the son of Daniel Foe and that James Foe was his uncle, not his father, as has been posited by Defoe scholars (xi). Martin explains that James Foe’s brother Daniel took over the family farm in Northamptonshire after the death of their father, who was also named Daniel Foe. The biographer Frank Bastian, in Defoe’s Early Life, notes that James Foe’s brother Daniel married and mentions a family, though he claims his children were the writer’s older first cousins. Martin disagrees, arguing that since Daniel Foe was the oldest male in the family, tradition dictated that the first born male would be named after the father: hence Daniel Defoe the writer was his eldest son rather than his nephew.

When we delve into this and other fascinating claims made by Martin, they soon begin to unravel, as J. A. Downie recently pointed out in “Defoe’s Birth,” a note in The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats. First, Daniel was a very common name among the (De) Foe families of Northamptonshire, where Martin claims Daniel Defoe was born. It is, therefore, difficult to associate the writer with one of the several Daniel Foes listed in the records of that region. Second, although Martin suggests that all historical facts are open to “misunderstanding” and are “a complex matter” (xv), he does not adequately address or explain away critical documents associated with the writer. This is evident time and time again, and I will offer four representative examples here.

First, in a marriage license dated December 28, 1683, Defoe’s age is given as about 24 years. For a man to state that he is fifteen or sixteen years younger than he is to his twenty-year-old wife and her wealthy father seems fanciful in the extreme. Further, in 1726, Defoe writes the following as “Andrew Moreton, Esq” in the preface to The Protestant Monastry: “[I] am in my 67th Year, almost worn out with Age and Sickness” (vi). If one deducts 67 years from 1726, we arrive at the year 1659 as Defoe’s birth year.1 Second, Martin tries to persuade us that Defoe did not attend Morton’s Academy in or around 1676 because he was working in Brazil on his sugar plantations from 1663 to 1680, but he fails along the way to tackle the evidence in The Present State of Parties (1712), in which Defoe mentions three “Western Martyres” from that academy, not by name but nickname: Kitt. Battersby, Young Jenkins, and Hewlin. These are certainly the sorts of schoolboy nicknames that would have been used at Morton’s Academy. Third, according to Martin, Defoe visited North America from September 1699 to August 1700; however, during that time, Defoe was in London arranging a lease for a house at 87 Woolstaple Round, Westminster, which was on Christ’s Hospital land (Peterson 325). Fourth, Martin has Defoe visiting Brazil and Madagascar in 1705/1706 as does Crusoe in The Father Adventures (1719). However, it appears from Defoe’s letters that he had returned to London from a long trip around England for Robert Harley on November 6, 1705, and was hard at work establishing a distribution network for his Review until the spring of 1706. According to John Robert Moore, Defoe wrote The Apparition of Mrs Veal (1706) on his return from this trip (168–69).

Martin’s claims about Defoe’s origins and life also result in self-contradiction. For example, Martin argues that the first part of Memoirs of a Cavalier (1720) should be read as allegorical autobiography. If this is the case, the dreams of the protagonist’s mother, which she records in her prayer book, must be those of Defoe’s own mother (xix). In the invocation, the Cavalier mentions “several strange Dreams” his mother “had while she was with Child of her second Son, which was myself” (1). However, according to Martin’s own chronology, Defoe was the first son of Daniel and Ellene Foe (xxxi). Martin does try to establish that Defoe’s father was married before and had a son with his first wife, Defoe’s half-brother Thomas King (53), but he later claims that Defoe had another older brother, Roger Fenwick, who served as Lieutenant-Colonel in Colonel Lockhart’s Regiment of Foot; Fenwick is identified by Martin as the older brother reported in the opening pages of Robinson Crusoe (1719), although he never provides any biographical evidence in support of this supposition (453). While he states that he has made room for this brother in the family chart on page 417 of Beyond Belief, there is no such chart on that page. Martin goes to some lengths to connect Defoe with Fenwick, but lacking evidence, he settles for trying to convince the reader that the connection could be possible. Martin seems to miss the point that the allusion to Lockhart in Robinson Crusoe serves a literary rather than a biographical purpose, with Defoe referring to Lockhart to connect Crusoe with the Commonwealth.

Martin also pursues at length the possible connection of Defoe to William Penn, querying Defoe’s connection with the Jacobites. However, Martin’s biography is so tainted by fiction, inaccuracies, and an unreliable chain-forging of evidence that any claims he makes on this topic are unconvincing. However, there is perhaps some measure of truth in Martin’s assertion that the lives of Defoe’s relatives, who clearly settled in Essex, inspired his works of fiction just as Henry Foe’s journal may have led, in part, to the production of A Journal of the Plague Year (1722).

Martin has clearly carried out a lot of research in Northamptonshire and the United States, and he has made some effort to link those records to the life and writings of Daniel Defoe. However, what he has not done is satisfactorily tackled the body of evidence that runs counter to his biographical conclusions.

Sheldon Rogers
University of Portsmouth

NOTES

1. I do not doubt, however, that Martin is correct in his assumption that Defoe could not have been born in 1659 as the legitimate son of James Foe, as one of James’s two daughters was born on June 19, 1659.

WORKS CITED

Bastian, Frank. Defoe’s Early Life. London: Macmillan, 1981. Print.

Defoe, Daniel. The Letters of Daniel Defoe. Ed. George Harris Healey. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955. Print.

—. Memoirs of a Cavalier. London: A. Bell and others, 1720. Print.

—. The Protestant Monastery. London: W. Meadows and others, 1727 [for 1726]. Print.

Downie, J. A. “Defoe’s Birth.” The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats 45.2 (2013): 225–30. Print.

Martin, John. Alien Come Home: The Story of Daniel Defoe’s Missing Years, 1644–1680. Sandy: Anglia Publishing, 2009. Print.

—. Beyond Belief: The Real Life of Daniel Defoe. Pembrokeshire: Accent Press, 2006. Print.

Moore, John Robert. Daniel Defoe: Citizen of the Modern World. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1958. Print.

Mundy, P. D. “The Ancestry of Daniel Defoe.” Notes and Queries 197 (1952): 382–83. Print.

Peterson, Spiro. “Defoe and Westminster, 1696–1706.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 12.3 (1979): 306–38. Print.

The business of defining satire, let alone assessing its uses and motivations, is fraught with difficulty. Much of the early part of Ashley Marshall’s study is devoted to establishing that previous scholarly accounts of satire’s history in the long eighteenth century have been misguided, or at least incomplete: they extrapolate broad conclusions from a small number of not-very-representative canonical texts; they tend to impose an inappropriate coherence upon a genre diverse in its tones, aims, and techniques. In fact, Marshall does not see satire as a genre at all, but follows Alastair Fowler in identifying it as a mode capable of inhabiting multiple genres (5). Marshall rejects a number of traditional ideas about satire’s common components—not all satires are indignant, for instance—and offers in their place a “descriptive characterization” that points to satire as an elaboration of critique: “critique plus distortion, critique plus humorous ridicule, or critique plus gratuitousness in motive” (3). The nuance and flexibility of this characterization lay the groundwork for a thorough exploration of the mode’s true significance within seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English culture. Marshall does not seek to offer a unified theory accounting for the many, diverse satires her work discusses. Indeed, at times it seems that her most important argument is for the mode’s overwhelming multifariousness, an argument which occasionally calls into question the very utility and value of satire as a literary category. However, The Practice of Satire also offers a number of more distinct, localized insights, which justify the endurance of the term in scholarly discourse. Marshall encourages her readers to think about the prices of specific satires, who would have been able to buy them, and whether such financial considerations align with the literary and academic considerations that have since shaped the satirical canon. And although she warns against simplistic narratives of satire’s ascent in the period, her close, taxonomically-minded attention to individual sub-periods demonstrates that certain aspects of the satiric mode did dominate at particular times and in particular political contexts.

Marshall’s discussion of satire in practice is usefully complemented by a chapter on how satire was envisaged and theorized at the time. Here again, variety is key. Where P. K. Elkin’s The Augustan Defence of Satire (1973) was willing to divide commentators into those for and those against, Marshall shows that such binaries are too simplistic (39). Contemporary commentary disagreed over what satire was and over its general literary importance: “nothing in the eighteenth century suggests that they saw it as a significant mode” (40). Moreover, Marshall exposes huge discrepancies between the methods and arguments adopted to defend or, alternatively, rebuke satirists. Opposition could stem either from an association of laughter with atheism or from a sense of satirical enterprise as fundamentally mean-spirited (44). Defoe sees himself as writing “for his allies, not his enemies” (53), a distinction which Marshall invokes at several points throughout this study in order to correct traditional views of satire as an inherently hostile mode. The various concerns that affect commentators’ attitudes toward satire’s propriety also affect their views on how to ensure its efficacy and whether it should be general or particular in its choice of targets. This is certainly a familiar debate, foregrounded repeatedly by satirists themselves, but for those whose main point of contact with the issue is Pope’s Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot or similar canonical works, it is refreshing to be confronted with a wider range of motivations for those engaged in this theoretical controversy. Marshall cites some commentators who viewed general satire as blasphemous, a libel against creation (61); on the other hand, one has the arguments of John Dennis, who favored general satire simply because it was, in his view, likely to bring about genuine moral change rather than retaliation or defensiveness (60). Once more, Marshall’s key message is one of discrepancy and disagreement, though the very nature of such disagreement tells us more about the era’s prevailing concerns than a single canonical work ever could.

Chapters 3–7 of Marshall’s study provide detailed and wide-ranging accounts of the state of satire at particular historical moments, and it is these survey chapters that are likely to prove most valuable to students and scholars of the period as a whole. Chapter 3, on Carolean satire, establishes the template that these overviews follow: fairly brief discussions of individual canonical authors—in this case, Rochester, Dryden and others—balanced out by less canonical material, and leading to observations of the sub-period’s general character insofar as this can be established. For Marshall, satire of the Carolean period was characterized by seriousness and ferocity; to a greater extent than any later satire, it lacked humor and rarely aspired to the status of literature (72–73). Further distinctions are also necessary, however. Marshall makes a strong case for seeing the later part of this sub-period, represented most notably by Part III of Butler’s Hudibras, as gloomier than the years immediately following the Restoration. She also argues, counter to a number of prevailing critical narratives, that there was a great level of continuity between pre-1660 and post-1660 satire (what came immediately before and after the Restoration), and that there was less continuity than one might expect between seventeenth-century satire and what followed it. Marshall is in general skeptical about terms like “Augustan,” and she is certainly opposed to any story of satire’s rise that would see the works of Dryden and Rochester as prototypes for those of Pope and Swift (111). In fact, though her attention to such canonical figures is at first surprising given the work’s attested commitment to a wider range of sources, one often ends up with a more complex view of writers too easily subsumed and diminished within grander narratives. The Dryden of the 1670s and 1680s is a different satirist from the Dryden of the 1690s, with a propagandistic edge which has often been overlooked by those overly beholden to notions of his high-mindedness (75). Bunyan’s place in the satiric tradition has likewise been neglected or distorted because, like Defoe, he is “strongly positive” in his approach to satire, at odds with our scholarly fixation on satiric aggression (109).

Subsequent chapters yield similarly nuanced reassessment. Just as Marshall objects to the notion of Augustanism, she also describes as a “critical delusion” the idea that the variegated satiric styles and agendas of Pope, Swift, Gay, and Arbuthnot can be explained through reference to a single “Scriblerian mode” (180). Devoting a chapter to the years 1700–1725 allows Marshall to isolate the earlier satiric works of such writers from later, more eye-catching achievements like The Beggar’s Opera or The Dunciad, thus emphasizing that the “canonical masterpieces […] were by no means obvious, necessary, or an inevitable development from the work of the previous two decades” (193). In fact, it is startling just how anomalous Pope’s position was in the earlier part of his career, The Rape of the Lock possessing dubious satiric credentials and suggesting little common ground—or even grounds for comparison—with the works of his friends. Defoe is, in many ways, a more representative figure in this early eighteenth-century satirical landscape, although, as Marshall notes, his goals have often been misunderstood through a lack of appreciation for satire’s flexibility. Marshall takes issue with the standard reading of The Shortest Way with the Dissenters as “the work of a failed ironist or a too-successful impersonator” (156). This is a reading which stems, again, from the misguided expectation that satire should attack or deceive. In Marshall’s view, Defoe is seeking to do neither of these things, but aims to “undeceive those with whom he identifies” through the production of “an intentional fake not meant to be decoded” (157). Early eighteenth-century satire as a whole is noted for its extreme multiplicity, but also for its “concentration of difficult, sober, argumentative satires” (298), a phenomenon particular to these few decades. The two following chapters, covering satire’s apparent Walpolean heyday (1726–1745) and its fortunes after the deaths of Pope and Swift (1745–1770), stress fragmentation, on one hand charting a movement towards more humane and sympathetic satiric conventions, and on the other documenting some of the most “abusive and cynical political satire” of the entire century (237).

This is an engaging and necessary work, one which corrects many enduring misunderstandings and oversimplifications regarding its subject matter. Marshall’s approach to the period and to literary history as a discipline is concisely summed up in a sentence from her epilogue: “The literary historian should not be seeking—and certainly should not be finding—anything like a coherent narrative” (289). If one disagrees with this statement, then the book is likely to frustrate; even those who agree might find themselves slightly at a loss when faced with the full, multi-directional array of evidence that Marshall has assembled here. But those willing to assess writers and works on an individual basis and to identify general trends without imposing uniformity, will find much that contributes to a more sophisticated appreciation of satire in the period. The book is not without some flaws. The arguments of its first chapter are perhaps slightly labored. Marshall offers a numeric table and several pages of discussion in order to establish that previous scholars of satire have concentrated on canonical works. Most readers would probably be content to take her at her word on this point. The extent of her commitment to a taxonomical methodology is also somewhat uncertain. She acknowledges that characterizing satires can be a problematically subjective process; making “reasonable guesses about motive and intensity” (105) is a worthwhile endeavor, but on balance, it is for the best that Marshall does not pursue this taxonomical agenda too systematically throughout her readings. Sensitive discussion is still more effective than statistical tabulation in conveying the complexity and diversity of satire in the long eighteenth century.

Emrys Jones
University of Greenwich

WORKS CITED

Elkin, P. K. The Augustan Defence of Satire. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973. Print.

Volume 9 in two parts completes John McVeagh’s magisterial nine-volume, eighteen-book edition of Defoe’s Review, a work of scholarship that has been greeted justly by Defoe scholars in particular, and by eighteenth-century scholars generally, with considerable acclaim. It consists of all numbers published between August 2, 1712 and June 9, 1713, 107 in total, plus an index covering the entire edition. The index is a splendid creation in itself. Tracking Defoe’s opinions on the state of religion and the Protestant Succession, the Pretender and the Jacobite threat, one can see clearly the role that periodical literature played in the formation of public opinion, and in Defoe’s aggressive responses to perceived attacks on his opinions we see the daily cut and thrust of the early eighteenth-century press in action.

In the opening lines of his introduction to volume 9, John McVeagh informs us that this volume “turned out to be the smallest of all.” Technically, it is not part of the Review proper. Defoe closed down A Review of the State of the British Nation after eight volumes before immediately re-launching it with the much shorter title of Review (vii). Despite its relative brevity, however, there is much in the two parts of volume 9 to savor. Social, economic, and political life in the near-final years of the Stuart regime is chronicled by Defoe, and reproduced meticulously by McVeagh, in all of its glory. The most pressing political issue in the volume is the looming demise of the Stuart dynasty and the proximity of the Hanoverian succession. The last years of Anne were, in the words of one historian, riddled with “intrigue and dissimulation, … strife, chaos, and the real possibility of bloody civil war.” The grounds for some of these fears were all too real; others were engineered by the Whig propaganda machine. Fear of Jacobitism was based on “fiction as well as facts,” with both Hanoverians and Stuart supporters keen to serve their own interests by “play[ing] up the Pretender’s prospects” (Hoppit 306). Unsurprisingly, then, issues of politics and religion – Jacobitism and anti-Catholicism, Anglicanism and Dissent – are prominent in the final volume. Here, as one might expect, Defoe’s voice is strident in its condemnation of the Pretender and Jacobites.

Defoe’s commentary on and interpretation of the pressing issues of the day contributed significantly to the whipping-up of the kind of fear to which Hoppit refers. In the Spectator number 125, July 24, 1711, Addison addresses this very topic, pointing to the insidious nature of political division. Taken to its extreme, the logical outcome is civil war. “There cannot a greater Judgment befall a country,” he writes, “than such a dreadful Spirit of Division as rends a Government into two distinct People.” And, he goes on, “If this Party-Spirit has so ill an Effect on our Morals, it has likewise a very great one upon our Judgments.” The Tatler of August 15 to August 22, 1710 similarly comments on the topsy-turvy, seemingly unstable political world: “I have formerly known a very well-bred Person refuse to return a bow of a Man whom he thought in Disgrace, that was next Day made Secretary of State.”

The periodicals of the day helped shape public opinion and the political culture of the day. The other periodicals published in the first decade of the eighteenth century, such as The Tatler, The Guardian, The Examiner, and The Spectator, along with The Review, did not simply report and reflect public opinion. They informed, but they also endeavored to persuade. Much like a modern newspaper, the periodical and news press of the early eighteenth century were culturally and politically influential. Defoe’s critical relentlessness about the dangers faced by the country should the Jacobites be successful in their intentions was echoed and contested across a range of periodical literature, all of which was highly partisan. Andrew Pettegree has recently pointed out in The Invention of News that the appearance of The Review was culturally and commercially timely. Although the “news” industry had been in existence long before Defoe et al. contributed to it, the early eighteenth century expansion of the reading public combined fortuitously with a considerable increase and interest in current affairs, domestic and foreign (Pettegree 1).

In Number 18, September 30, 1712, for instance, we read that a pre-occupation with an external threat – i.e. the Pretender – is as nothing compared to the danger to hearth and home represented by the internal menace that is Jacobitism. “I wonder to see those People,” writes Defoe, “who talk so much of the Danger of the Pretender, overlook the Growth and Increase of Jacobitism at home.” Such people have put their trust in “Foreign Alliances and Guarantees” (9: 69). Contemporaries were not blind to Defoe’s rabble-rousing rhetoric. Number 15 of The Examiner, November 16, 1710, sees Swift describe the editors of The Review and the Observator newspaper as “two stupid illiterate Scribblers, both of them Fanaticks by Profession.” For Swift, Defoe and his rival are no better than rabble-rousers, demagogues who appeal to the “lowest part of Mankind.” In Numbers 30 and 32, issued on November 11 and 18, 1712, Defoe responds to those who complain that they are tired of hearing him on this issue in a typically unapologetic fashion, and continues to question critically his readers’ loyalty and their duty as citizens. Accordingly, the opening sentences of Number 30 are trenchant: “I Have stated the Case of the Succession with what clearness I can; I have told you where your danger lies, and from what cause it proceeds. If what I say is just, I care not how much my Noise offends you, for I write to please none of you, but to waken you” (9: 116). As an editorial position this leaves little room for doubt. The danger to the Protestant Succession personified in a Catholic pretender was keenly felt in 1712–13. It continued to plague the political life of the nation until 1745, and beyond.

Although Defoe here treats the Pretender, and the Jacobites within Britain, as distinct and separate issues, this is not always the case in other numbers, as his sentiments aired in Number 32 demonstrate: “Nobody would be willinger than I,” he offers, “to forward any Thing that would secure us against the Pretender.” Not, however, at any price. Although “Whiggish” in his views – on commerce, on Jacobitism, on the importance of the Hanoverian Succession, and on good relations with the Dutch – he was not averse to criticising the Whigs where he thought it necessary. These views were extended in pamphlets published in the last years of Anne’s reign such as A Defence of the Allies, An Essay on the Treaty of Commerce with France, and, with its heavily ironic title, Reasons against the Succession of the House of Hanover. As Paula Backscheider has pointed out in Daniel Defoe: His Life, these works are bitingly and blatantly sarcastic: they argued that if the Pretender was successful in his return the country would learn the meaning of slavery (323). He returns to the subject in Number 23, October 18, 1712, where once again he points out that more, not less, needs to be said in defence of the Protestant Succession. The war for hearts and minds is being lost in the provinces and in the countryside more generally: “These are the Artifices of the Jacobite Party over the whole Kingdom, and by these methods they prevail but too much over the common People … [if] the interest of the Pretender becomes Popular, I speak it plainly, I’ll not give a farthing for your Protestant Succession” (9: 93).

For anyone interested in the culture and politics of the early eighteenth century, then, McVeagh’s edition is essential reading. The Review in the older facsimile edition has served scholars well. McVeagh’s edition, re-set, annotated, and properly edited with an excellent index, is an outstanding replacement.

David Walker
Northumbria University

WORKS CITED

Backscheider, Paula R. Daniel Defoe: His Life. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1989. Print.

Hoppit, Julian. A Land of Liberty: England 1689–1727. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Print.

Pettegree, Andrew. The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself. New Haven: Yale UP, 2014. Print.

Rogers, Pat. Ed. Defoe: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1972. Print.

Ross, Angus. Ed. Selections from The Tatler and The Spectator. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982. Print.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a “contrarian” as “a person who (habitually) opposes or rejects prevailing opinion or established practice; someone who behaves in a contrary manner; (Finance) an investor who goes against the current consensus when trading, e.g. by buying shares in a company when their price is falling.” In my meager slate of investments, a contrarian fund, shares of which I bought when it was touted in the 1990s, rises and falls at alarming rates. It is a fund whose philosophy goes against the grain; it is managed in counter-intuitive, oppositional ways. This is effectively Merrett’s view of Defoe: contrary, “contrariant,” oppositional, “mutually antagonistic.” His works progress, as Blake would have it, and as Merrett underscores in one of the many arresting epigraphs to his book, by “[c]ontraries,” by a judicious (and sometimes, I might add, a not so judicious) alignment of opposites: secular and spiritual imperatives, rhetorical styles, generic modes, and social and cultural attitudes and norms. The whole exposes an “imaginary” (a term that Merrett adopts from the French) that is fueled by Defoe’s energetic curiosity about point of view, his tendency to adumbrate multiple sides of a question. Hence, Defoe is drawn to plurality, irony, and paradox, strategies that favor—indeed, often embrace and encourage—opposing views. Merrett argues that such a proclivity is deliberate, a sign of Defoe’s conscious art. Deploying, loosely, methods of discourse analysis, reader-response theory, and explication de texte to reveal the system behind Defoe’s apparent proteanism, Merrett contends that Defoe aligns conflicting claims with care, intent thereby “to make accessible the deep structures of cognitive and spiritual awareness” (xi) and to challenge his readers to ponder more deeply and dynamically the issues of his works. It is a heavy claim, and it may be true—as may be Merrett’s contention that Defoe “to a degree anticipated developments in semiotic and speech-act theory” (xii). Merrett offers repeated evidence of Defoe’s “polarity thinking” across a broad spectrum of texts and emphasizes, especially in the fiction, Defoe’s unusual attentiveness to (and demands upon) his readers.

Merrett covers a wide expanse of Defoe’s work—fiction; political, theological, and economic tracts; prefaces; manuals of matrimony—and canvasses Defoe’s views on subjects as varied as philology, music, and pulpit oratory. Such a comprehensive approach suggests that Merrett is making a claim for how Defoe’s mind works: dialectically, polymorphically. This dynamic marks, Merrett observes, Defoe’s fictional and non-fictional texts, and he therefore (in a deliberate departure from critical tradition) finds it fruitful to examine them under a similar rubric.

The evidence for “polar,” “dialectical,” or “contrarian” thinking, as Merrett variously calls it, is abundant in Defoe’s corpus: it is noticeable in Defoe’s excurses on love, domesticity, and spiritual health in marriage and in the fraught issues of male dominance and female subservience, which Defoe alternately and complexly critiques and endorses. It characterizes Defoe’s political commentaries on kingship and liberty and his theological-cultural observations on Quakerism, Catholicism, and Islam. It is a distinctive feature of his fictional narratives, in which characters, or characters and their creator, embrace multiple attitudes toward secular and spiritual issues.

Merrett’s study is divided into eight chapters. The first chapter argues that Defoe’s attention to polysemy (what E. Anthony James called Crusoe’s “semantic quibbl[ing]” [167]—“Shovel or Spade,” “a Thing like a Hodd”) conveys Defoe’s awareness of spoken English and his characters’ recognition that language conveys opposing views, creating, in Merrett’s opinion, “dispersions” rather than synonymies of meaning (9), juxtapositions rather than reinforcements of concepts. In Robinson Crusoe, such strategies subtly convey Crusoe’s “ambivalent moral and spiritual condition” (9). Captain Singleton, more dramatically afflicted with spiritual ennui, adopts a similar narrative habit.

Time schemes and place schemes (in A Journal of the Plague Year, Colonel Jack, and Roxana, for example, and in the circular geographical trajectory of Moll Flanders) further complicate and “stretch” Defoe’s fictional plots, highlighting his interest in causation, an interest that Merrett contends has a deeply theological foundation. Indeed, as he describes it, Defoe’s allegiance to dialectical thought processes stylistically informs his theological and political writings as well (writings that Merrett feels provide a basis for Defoe’s fictions), resulting in fictional and factual narrations of “rich textual plurality” (42).

Defoe’s characters’ reflective and reflexive thinking is conveyed by Defoe’s frequent use of the phrase “just Reflections,” an imperative for both his (all too often insufficiently reflective) characters and for his readers, an adjuration for moral and spiritual contemplation, and a reminder that profane acts are capable of—and almost inevitably demand—translation into religious insights. Merrett accordingly tracks Crusoe’s errant course toward spiritual truth, arguing that his reflections remain incomplete and anticlimactic until the work’s third volume, Serious Reflections, the method and substance of which Merrett discusses in a subsequent chapter. Similar avoiders (or non-starters) of spiritual self-examination are Captain Singleton, Moll Flanders, and Colonel Jack, and, most emphatically, Roxana, from all of whom Defoe passes the baton to the reader in a quest to improve the reflections of these masters and mistresses of spiritual ineptitude. The “evasions inherent in reasoning” (71) that are often exemplified in Defoe’s narrators’ cunningly contorted tales is similarly a topic of implicit and explicit emphasis in his conduct manuals, Religious Courtship, The Complete English Tradesman, and Conjugal Lewdness.

Dialectical tensions between secular and spiritual domains are prominent in Serious Reflections and, according to Merrett, inform all of Defoe’s narrative projects, indicating that for Defoe narrative meaning derives from a grasp of particular event and general truth. That all of Defoe’s narratives depend heavily upon the Bible clarifies that reading, in Defoe’s view, is a hermeneutic exercise, involving a careful balancing of tensions between secular and religious values. This idea is extrapolated in the following chapter in which Merrett explores the astonishing range of biblical allusions embedded in Defoe’s work as well as the various creative adaptations and refashionings of these allusions in texts from The Complete English Tradesman to Roxana. (In the index, biblical allusions and typology take up an eye-opening four columns.)

The relevance of the Bible to Defoe’s political ideas (his allegiance to monarchy, his belief in the limits of religious liberty) and his penchant for impersonation are taken up in the next chapter, in which Merrett also discusses Defoe’s distaste for Catholicism and his mingled censure of and curiosity toward Islam, the latter of which attitudes confirms, in Merrett’s view, Defoe’s resistance to contemporary prejudices against Islam and an interest in challenging cultural norms in his characteristically contrarian way.

Similar ideas inform Defoe’s fictions, which repeatedly elaborate concerns about the exercise of political authority, a concept that is intimately related to a sense of God’s jurisdiction over the affairs of men. Thus, in Robinson Crusoe, as in Captain Singleton and Colonel Jack in particular, Defoe is overtly preoccupied with inappropriate political and religious imaginings and their interconnection (also examined in A Journal of the Plague Year, Moll Flanders, and Roxana).

A related dialectic informs the marital tracts and those fictions in which marriage is a central problem (that is, all of them except the first volume of Robinson Crusoe). In these works, Defoe propounds both traditional and untraditional attitudes toward marriage, love, and sexuality, and underscores the relationship between healthy domesticity and spiritual self-examination as well as registering a progressive sensitivity to gender inequality in courtship and marriage.

The longest of Merrett’s chapters, which concludes his study, explores more closely the ways in which Defoe’s narratives are necessarily (by virtue of his dialectical method) recursive and multiform: generically mixed, both historical and proleptic, amusing (“descriptive”) and moral (“prescriptive”). In this section, Merrett examines Defoe’s fictional prefaces and their conflicting claims of utility and entertainment, and the attention to reading throughout, as well as the instability of Defoe’s narrators’ tales and their vacillation between public (audible) and private (often inaudible) discourse.

If Merrett’s claims about Defoe’s “polar sense” seem occasionally a bit obtrusive and translate a bit woodenly into his analyses of Defoe’s fictions (the treatment of which tends on occasion to be overly elaborated and descriptive), his point that Defoe’s narrators seem constitutionally unable or unwilling to “solve the problem[s] of personal integrity and moral will” (230) that confront them is well worth making. Defoe’s contrarian stance refracts and complicates any injunctions to problem-solve, on the part of Defoe’s characters and on the part of his readers. I would argue that Defoe’s narrators, preternaturally concerned (even more so than Merrett contends here) with telling their stories and covering their tracks, cease (guiltily or cavalierly) to heed the moral demands that have propelled their narratives in the first place, and so their attention to readers’ reception of these strange and turgid tales is unusually high. Shuttling, as Merrett claims, as in the non-fictional works, between “description and prescription” (232, 234), with narrators “deficient in narrative integrity” (235) at the helm, Defoe produces recursive tracts that display repeated tensions between secular and religious values (as critics of Defoe have long noted), audition and silence, public and private, and diverse generic modes.

I do not share Merrett’s sense of Defoe as a highly deliberate artist, creating fictional characters that reflect in coherent ways on selfhood and narration, but I do agree that these are aspects of Defoe’s work that are among the most vivid and original and that deserve more critical attention. It may be a bit extreme to argue that Defoe embraces the “bicameral mind” (as Merrett does in his final chapter), but perhaps this is semantic quibbling: this work brings into focus the deep divisiveness and contrarianism of both Defoe’s fictions and his social and political tracts and of the contrarian pattern that is the hallmark of both his writing and his mentalité—as Merrett would have it, of his imaginary.

Elizabeth R. Napier
Middlebury College

WORKS CITED

James, E. Anthony. Daniel Defoe’s Many Voices: A Rhetorical Study of Prose Style and Literary Method. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1972. Print.

Oxford English Dictionary. www.oed.com. Web.

Emmanuelle Peraldo’s Daniel Defoe et l’écriture de l’histoire reflects on the relationship between Daniel Defoe’s “historical” writings (this problematical term is abundantly analyzed throughout the book) and his later fiction, in the wake of Robert Mayer’s History and the Early English Novel: Matters of Fact from Bacon to Defoe (1997) and Maximillian Novak’s Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions (2001). Although Peraldo acknowledges a debt to recent Defoe scholarship, her study is also informed by the work of several contemporary historians (Hayden White among others) and theorists of history such as Paul Ricœur, who, unlike early modern British historians, is regularly mentioned in the course of her study. The book is divided into four sections, with each chapter usually laying stress on a particular work by Defoe, although some of the works mentioned in one section occasionally reappear later for the purpose of argumentation.

The first section, entitled “Defoe and scholarly history” (“Defoe et l’histoire savante”), examines Defoe in his historical context. In chapter 1, Peraldo studies Defoe’s “monumental” (31) contributions to the history of the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707. She reminds the reader that Defoe’s works in that period, including The History of the Union (1709) and numerous briefer pamphlets, are perhaps the most important sources on the history of the Union, even though they are the products of the pro-Union camp (39). The History of the Union is also seen as more than a work of mere propaganda, since it already seems to prefigure, in Maximillian Novak’s words, “the kind of fiction Defoe would eventually write” (47, quoting Novak 349). The other major works Peraldo scrutinizes in this chapter are the Review (1704–13), which performs the same propagandist functions, through different modalities, as the History; Memoirs of the Church of Scotland (1717), presented as private memoranda that allow Defoe to write a history of the Church of England from both an individual and a global perspective; and poems such as The Vision (1706) and Caledonia (1706). As an aside, Caledonia has been recently translated into French by Peraldo and will be published in a forthcoming book by Honoré Champion.

The next important work which the author studies in detail (chapter 2) is A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–26). Peraldo argues that the numerous and not always trustworthy details about the places Defoe visited can be interpreted as “realistic tools” (“instruments réalistes”), the purpose of which is to make the narrative seem more credible, in the manner of Roland Barthes’s effet de réel. Here, she primarily analyzes the book as a work of fiction. Similarly, in the same chapter, Peraldo applies Gérard Genette’s Fiction et diction (1991) to assert that a text like the Tour, with its “pseudo-references,” does not ultimately “referentialize itself” but “fictionalizes” its references (69). Hence, like The History of the Union, the Tour is seen as a forerunner of Defoe’s later fictions, especially A Journal of the Plague Year (1722). The Tour is considered as a narrative that also allows its author to draw maps of the British Isles: Peraldo shows that Defoe’s linguistic strategies can be compared with the geographer’s techniques, both of which make, for example, history more visual and “palpable” (89–90). In her third chapter, Peraldo studies the use of numbers and figures in A Journal of the Plague Year and Due Preparations for the Plague (1722). These narratives are analyzed as the two parts of a diptych, whose innumerable dates, toponyms, and numbers, but also lacunae, create a “saturation” (100), so that the reader is not ultimately asked to give them credence but, rather, is expected to believe in a kind of truth that is more exemplary than properly historical (107).

The second part of Daniel Defoe et l’écriture de l’histoire examines Defoe’s personal involvement (“participation”) in his own stories, either as a private witness or as a political propagandist. It begins with a consideration of the anonymity adopted by Defoe, who almost systematically cultivated the authorial posture of a “veracious narrator” (123, quoting Damrosch 153) imposed by duty, necessity, or choice, or even sometimes by the writer’s own “delectation” (134). Peraldo analyzes the connection between the truth claims made by Defoe in the introductory parts of his narratives and the posture of anonymity. In the next chapter, she wonders whether, as a historian of his own time, whose political writings dealt with contemporary history, Defoe was in a position to attain a certain degree of “objectivity” (142). This leads her to study the political journals of the period and to concentrate again on Defoe’s celebrated political periodical the Review, whose historical purpose is clearly stated by Defoe himself (163). Peraldo shows how, paradoxically, the narratives embedded in the Review’s essays are often secondhand fictional stories, which leads her to wonder whether this periodical could be regarded as a literary work, and to suggest more generally that the fictionality that pervaded periodical essays in the early eighteenth century played an important part in the rise of the novel (167–74). In this section, Peraldo builds on, among other critical works, Lennard Davis’s Factual Fictions (1983), as well as Alain Bony’s Leonora, Lydia et les autres (2004). She concludes that Defoe’s journalistic discourse has literary value, lying halfway between historical and fictional discourses (171).

The third part of Peraldo’s study focuses on the theological writings of Defoe, produced during his later career, a lesser-known corpus of writings that includes demonological treatises such as The Political History of the Devil (1726), A System of Magick (1726), and An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions (1727). These texts are analyzed in terms of providential history, strongly influenced by the biblical narrative (206), as well as, paradoxically, by the rationalism of the Royal Society (211–12). These considerations are followed by an examination of the providential patterning of Defoe’s major fictions, including Robinson Crusoe (1719) and the narratives focusing on natural disasters, such as tempests (The Storm [1704]) or epidemics (A Journal of the Plague Year), in which divine Providence is considered to be a “structural principle of Defoe’s fictions” (“principe structural des fictions de Defoe” [215]). Peraldo then takes up Defoe’s views on demonology and on the supernatural as they are dramatized in his theological writings, offering an original account of the author’s devotion to factual history. Finally, the third chapter of this section offers a reflection on the kind of history Defoe produces, “History/ history/ histories/ his story” (243), and insists on the importance of Defoe’s major contribution in these fields, namely his study of history from the point of view of dropouts—among these she concentrates on pirates (like several contemporary critics, she includes A General History of the Pyrates [1724–28] in her examination of Defoe’s corpus [132]).

The last part of Peraldo’s study considers the structural relationship between historiography and fictional narrative, borrowing from Ricœur’s theory of “emplotment,” common to both historical and fictional narratives, and applying it to Defoe’s travel narratives, which she locates on an unstable boundary between the historical and the fictional. She then examines Robinson Crusoe again to suggest that it offers a kind of allegorical counterpoint to the Tour (271), Defoe’s “novel” being seen as a political and economical allegory, and the Tour as a disguised novel (277). After a discussion of Defoe’s “proto-historical novels,” his works on the plague as well as Memoirs of a Cavalier (1720), Peraldo concludes with the elusiveness of Defoe’s narratives which tend to blur generic categories (305), illustrated by the problematic reception of A Journal of the Plague Year in the centuries that followed its publication. The narrative techniques of the Journal (the use of charts, lists, and inventories), Peraldo suggests, are borrowed from the historians of the period, as are H.F.’s “truth claims.” In this section, more explicit references to the works of historians contemporaneous with Defoe would have been welcome, as they might have shed greater light on the originality of his own pseudo-historical practices. The final chapter of this section attempts to assess in a few pages Defoe’s importance in the development of a new kind of writing, namely, the novel. This chapter locates Defoe’s writings in the heated debate on the “origins” of the English novel in the wake of Ian Watt’s pioneering study, insisting on the status of Defoe’s novels as workshops in which narrative experimentations are being conducted, some two decades before “novelists” embarked on generic considerations about the new “genre” they illustrated.

In Daniel Defoe et l’écriture de l’histoire, Peraldo sheds light on a variety of works written by Defoe himself, but also on works by such philosophers and historians as Paul Ricœur, Hayden White, and Paul Veyne, whom she regularly mentions in the course of her study. The reader will appreciate the numerous pedagogical introductions that contextualize the various works or concepts she discusses, especially for those who are unfamiliar with the lesser-known titles attributed to Defoe. Peraldo also shows she has a precise knowledge of many of Defoe’s works, including the proliferation of pamphlets that appeared in the wake of the publication of The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702) or when Britain was preparing itself for the plague in the early 1720s, to name but two instances. Another achievement of the author is her skilled rhetorical analyses of several extracts from Defoe’s works (see especially 85, 174, 297, 299, 313), which indeed might have been fruitfully developed at greater length. This well-informed study takes into account the recent scholarship on Defoe, as well as contemporary theories of history, and offers a useful and impressive bibliography of 873 items together with no less than sixteen substantial annexes. Finally, Peraldo’s analyses of Defoe’s “cartographic narration” (91) have been interestingly pursued in three recent articles (see the Works Cited) which develop some of the ideas formulated at the end of the first part of her book.

Baudouin Millet
Université Lumière-Lyon 2

WORKS CITED

Bony, Alain. Leonora, Lydia et les autres: Etude sur le (nouveau) roman anglais du XVIIIe siècle. Lyon: PU de Lyon, 2004. Print.

Damrosch, Leopold Jr. “Defoe as Ambiguous Impersonator.” Modern Philology 71 (1973): 153-59. Print.

Davis, Lennard. Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel. New York: Columbia UP, 1983. Print.

Genette, Gérard. Fiction et Diction. Paris: Le Seuil, 1991. Print.

Mayer, Robert. History and the Early English Novel: Matters of Fact from Bacon to Defoe. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Print.

Novak, Maximillian E. Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions: His Life and Ideas. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. Print.

Peraldo, Emmanuelle. “‘Gulliver, Robinson et les autres…’: Espace du texte et textualisation de l’espace au XVIIIe siècle.” Revue de la Société d’Etudes Anglo-Américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles HS3 (2013): 91–111. Print.

—. “Narrative Cartography in the Eighteenth Century: Defoe’s Exploration of Great Britain in The Tour.” Narratives of Travels and Tourism. Ed. Jacqueline Tivers and Tijana Rakić. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012. 97–108. Print.

—. “Telling Figures and Telling Feelings: The Geography of Emotions in the London of Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year and Due Preparations for the Plague (1722).” Revue de la Société d’Etudes Anglo-Américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles 69 (2012): 167–83. Print.

Ricœur, Paul. Time and Narrative. Vol. 1.Translated by Kathleen McLauglin and David Pellauer. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984. Print.

Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. London: Chatto and Windus, 1957. Print.

The explosion of studies attending to urban experience in recent decades has renewed our interest in cities as sites of material, social, and cultural production. Urban studies has emerged in the last few decades out of a perceived crisis of the urban which owed as much to the implosion of urban cores and the globalized nature of a dispersed urban field as to the need for a change in the representational paradigm of the city. The “science of the city” as proposed by Lefebvre correctly suggested that its object could only be approached through an integrated theory “using the resources of science and art” (158). The symbolic and the metaphorical – privileged domains of the literary – cannot and should not be ignored in this inquiry about the present state of a civilization in which the experience of space is increasingly mediated by images and cultural discourses that decisively shape and mold its future.

Hye-Joon Yoon’s Metropolis and Experience is to be welcomed as part of this inquiry into the representation of urban experience in the past, an inquiry which may throw light on the present and future of an ever more complex and seemingly illegible urbanized world. Intent on the exploration of “the manner and the mode in which the metropolis becomes a form, as well as the content, of experience” (296), the book stands squarely and unashamedly within the tradition of literary critical discourse and textual analysis, while acknowledging its debt to a wider theoretical framework ranging from (among others) Georg Simmel to Giorgio Agamben, Pierre Bourdieu to David Harvey.

Critically up-to-date and well-grounded in a variety of scholarly studies, Metropolis and Experience both benefits from and contributes to the interdisciplinary nature of the field, making use of close reading, attention to textual detail, and a focus on literary modes and strategies in order to foster our understanding of how the metropolis has been experienced and signified from Defoe to Joyce. The choice of writers under scrutiny hardly needs justification, given their unquestioned status and relevance to the topic in question. What Hye-Joon Yoon calls “professional monogamy” (the exclusive focus on individual authors) is here deliberately eschewed in favour of a more inclusive and expansive view, which retains the three canonical figures as a pivotal centre but branches out to reach and accommodate a myriad of others. No one can accuse this book of monogamy or even bigamy; it presents us with a veritable harem in which the three favourite wives are surrounded by a whole cohort of concubines all vying for attention. Pepys and Baudelaire, Behn and Flaubert, Dampier and Bunyan are only some of the figures who are called in to help paint this vast canvas of urban literature.

The book is comprehensive in its scope, and its chronological span is also ambitious, drawing on expert knowledge of three distinct phases of the urban as well as of the vast bibliography that accompanies the development of cities in the past three centuries. But this wide scope undoubtedly affords Hye-Joon Yoon interesting possibilities for a comparative study which engages as much with unsuspected genealogies and new lineages as with the genetic (dis)similarities to be found in texts sharing a historical moment.

The book’s method, combining a wide diachronic dimension with extensive synchronic analysis, needs a clearly-defined guiding principle to create order and cohesion out of an immense and amorphous multitude of texts. This is provided by the two interrelated concepts of Erfahrung and Erlebnis, German equivalents of the English term ‘experience’ which carry significant (and in this case strategically important) nuances of meaning. Erfahrung is here understood as experience gained through travel and acquired over time, a “philosophical labour for investigating the basis of knowledge through reason and sensation” (9). Erfahrung, although subjectively constructed, can therefore be conceived “in terms of inter-generational communication” (11), comprising a distinctively communal and collective dimension. Erlebnis, on the other hand, is fleeting, momentary and instantaneous, emerging out of an individual’s sensory and psychological perception. By nature irreproducible, Erlebnis is experience which begins and ends within individual consciousness and cannot therefore be shared in any meaningful way with the rest of the community.

Laid out in the Introduction, this conceptual framework presides over the discussion of Defoe, Dickens, and Joyce, generating three different versions of the dynamic between Erfahrung and Erlebnis which both enhance our understanding of each author and convincingly display how metropolitan experience has evolved over time and in the process given rise to specific forms of writing. Defoe’s vision of the city as the domain par excellence of the private sphere in which Erlebnis reigns supreme is followed by Dickens’s attempts to balance a highly individualized urban experience with a network of connections which will turn the city into a legible communal entity. The last chapter is devoted to Joyce’s metropolitan subjects, who for Hye-Joon Yoon are “far too heterogeneous and centrifugal to be subjects of either Erlebnis or Erfahrung” (297). This registers the disintegration of both private and public spheres – a “dead end […] for the metropolitan novel” (298) as the author understands it.

The general argument of the book is persuasively presented and (although not startlingly original or radically innovative in some respects) provides the reader with a fresh perspective from which to appreciate the contradictory pulls between public and private spheres, between subject-centred or communally-orientated discourses on the city. And if we are occasionally left wondering whether this conceptual scaffolding can support the weight of a critical study which spans three centuries and dozens of texts, we must recognize that in many ways this is a book which seems to avoid grand narratives and eschew the dominant vistas of the terrain. Instead, it prefers to work at street level, walking along some well-trodden thoroughfares but above all exploring the forgotten nooks and hidden corners of the labyrinthine writing on the city. (The analysis of the seventeenth-century “character pamphlet” and that of Dujardin’s influence on Joyce come to mind.) Always thorough, occasionally digressive, and somewhat overcrowded, Metropolis and Experience confronts the multitudinous diversity of urban texts with the same fascinated attention to detail and nuance in which the genre itself delights.

One of the foundational concepts of the book, should, however, have been given deeper consideration. Defoe’s eighteenth-century London, Dickens’s industrial capital, and Joyce’s “colonial” Dublin are very different places, and to define all three as ‘metropolises’ is perhaps to stretch the concept beyond its permissible elasticity. The loosely defined use of the term (together with its companion key word “modernity,” which is also applied unproblematically across the board), immediately creates connections where we might want to consider ruptures or at least significant divergences. Simmel’s notion of the metropolitan psyche (emerging out of the need to understand the new and unprecedented consequences of an industrialized and mechanized twentieth-century civilization) does not sit comfortably alongside the demands made on the subject by Defoe’s mercantile city. But this is a reading that the book encourages, or at least tacitly allows. A more rigorous qualification of its key terminology would have added depth and validity to the general argument, enabling it to unfold in a more authoritative and nuanced way.

This, however, is not to detract from the valuable insights that Metropolis and Experience has in store. Clearly aimed at an academic audience, the book has much to offer the general reader with an interest in the evolving fate of the city and the literature that helped shape its form and meaning. Eighteenth-century scholars and other Defoe enthusiasts will relish, for instance, its incisive interpretation of Defoe’s “paratactic prosaics” and his use of the “disjunctive conjunction” as part of a revolution in English prose which liberated it from classical paradigms and enabled it effectively to dramatize the experience of a new urban reality. Equally compelling is the discussion of Pepys’s obsession with bodily functions (such as ejaculation and defecation) as an attempt to maintain control over the private body in an age in which the circulation and fluidity of the money markets are about to become threatening and pervasive.

The book’s Conclusion does, however, strike a discordant note in a study which otherwise celebrates the vibrancy of the field. The demise of the metropolitan novel, already imputed to Joyce in the book’s last section, is here explained in terms of the unfolding world of postmodern, global capitalism. The “rabid tyranny headed by developers and the construction industry” (298), responsible for the disappearance of the civic and cultural centre of post-war cities, has relegated “meaningful human relationship … to the margins and interstices,” impeding any “imaginative intervention for the sake of human experience” (299). The ‘anti-city’ we live in today has, in short, dealt the final blow to the metropolitan novel as we know it.

This apocalyptic view of the present and future of the city and of culturally significant urban writing, debatable as it is, may stem partly from the book’s exclusive concentration on the novel. Hye-Joon Yoon early on elects the genre as the one that can “best come to terms with the problem of experiencing the metropolis, for the novels mediate between the excess and dearth of experience” (5). But in controversially relegating other forms (like poetry and drama) to a marginal role in this process, the author has left himself with nowhere to go on the contemporary literary and cultural scene. “Novels after Joyce, after Hollywood, after television, after computer games, are content or grateful to take up one corner in the Vanity Fair of our entertainment industry” (301) is his lament for the fate of the genre in our time, a failing from which only Calvino and Saramago are exempted. But the lost centrality of the novel, concomitant with the decentring of the urban, has provided new spaces of signification and eclectic modes of confronting and appropriating metropolitan experience. The demise of the metropolitan novel, even if granted, may be part of a changing paradigm which now, as in the past, will successfully rise to the challenge of dealing with the city’s plasticity and constantly shifting boundaries, and hopefully will continue to produce vibrant accounts of our experience as urban dwellers. The utopian impulse has always been indissociable from the city. This is no time to give up on its limitless possibilities.

Jacinta Maria Matos
University of Coimbra

WORKS CITED

Lefebvre, Henri. Writings on Cities. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Print.