Invited by a Blackwell editor to compose this eighteenth-century volume, John Richetti writes in the acknowledgments that his task was “exhilarating but extremely challenging.” It is too short, he notes, and there is “so much that has to be left out or treated with less than adequate thoroughness and appreciation” (viii). Primary source materials are largely cited from accepted editions and foundational anthologies, such as Roger Lonsdale’s Eighteenth-Century Women Poets (1989), Paula R. Backscheider and Catherine E. Ingrassia’s British Women Poets of the Long Eighteenth Century (2009), and David Fairer and Christine Gerrard’s Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Edition (2004). Richetti’s secondary sources are slim, no doubt a consequence of the limited space he has to summarize major developments during the period itself for the main audience of the Blackwell History of Literature series: undergraduate and graduate students largely unfamiliar with eighteenth-century literature. The series focuses on broad but generically or thematically focused introductions to literary periods and movements. Series volumes are foundational, an invitation for beginning scholars to see the period in gestalt, delve into selected texts as case studies, and then seek out their own answers to questions that cannot be answered in the survey. His purpose is thus not to summarize the current state of eighteenth-century studies as a discipline, identify trends and recent innovations, or anticipate upcoming changes for experienced scholars of the field. Yet veteran scholars, too, can benefit from the volume’s lucid articulation of many of the major developments across the period’s verse, drama, nonfiction, and the novel form.

Blackwell histories are written by the leading scholars of a generation, and they represent the major works of the period, overview common interpretations of those works, and provide clear, authoritative information of historical relevance to the works and the period. Richetti provides all of this, and he does so in a prose style that is accessible, energetic, and playful. In the full Blackwell series, A History of Eighteenth-Century British Literature stands out: Richetti’s voice captures the intellectual and artistic energy of the period. It would be difficult not to enjoy reading about the eighteenth century while perusing this ambitious volume. It might remind one of Richetti’s PennSound recitations of eighteenth-century poetry. Benjamin Gottlieb has described Richetti’s voice, in those recordings, as having a “charmingly insouciant tone, one that belies the considerate thought he has given each recitation, which are never less than great fun, and are often quite revelatory.” The same could be said of Richetti’s written tone in the Blackwell history. At one moment, Richetti can be refreshingly clear and straightforward: “Dryden himself had been no prig,” he observes on the first page of the introduction; “he kept an actress as his mistress for years” (1). At another moment, and particularly when deep into the language of his verse examples, Richetti can open to students (and experienced scholars) a new landscape of terms, such as in his analysis of The Rape of the Lock: “The technical rhetorical term for what Ariel presents as equal alternative possibilities—the loss of chastity (‘Diana’s Law’) or the crack in a porcelain vase, or a stain on Belinda’s honor or on her dress, etc.—is zeugma, whereby in this case the two objects of each verb are grammatically equal but morally askew” (15).

Richetti opens the volume with John Dryden’s “Ode to Mrs. Anne Killigrew” (1686) and the after-piece The Secular Masque (1699), which present the literary developments of the seventeenth century with nostalgia and regret and anticipate the eighteenth century with hope. In a sense, Dryden highlights the zeugmatic relationship between two temporal categories of human experience and morality, one looking forward and one looking back. Dryden sees in Killigrew’s earlier poetry an “unsoiled” tradition that became corrupted by the debauchery of the later decades of the century, demonstrated in Dryden’s own writings, as well as his contemporaries’. The Secular Masque looks hopefully toward the new century, and Richetti capably transitions from Dryden’s work, and from his bitter loss of the position of poet laureate, to a brief but helpful overview of the major events, local and global, of seventeenth-century English history that would continue to shape the verse, prose, and drama of the next period.

From there, Richetti’s eighteenth century is not simply a chronological list of predictable, canonical examples of verse, drama, nonfiction, and fiction; his is a period still under archival construction, as Bonnie Gunzenhauser and Wolfram Schmidgen had noted was the trend in their summary of scholarly approaches to the period in the 2004 issue of College Literature. They found that at the 2004 meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, scholars were avidly presenting on their discoveries and editing of neglected texts. “Who would have twenty years ago thought that there is a large body of working class poetry in the eighteenth century?” they asked (94). Gunzenhauser and Schmidgen noted how New Historicism helped remove the boundaries that had categorized, and in many ways limited, eighteenth-century scholarship through at least the 1980s. At the same time, the embrace of theory by scholars of the period, coupled with unprecedented new twenty-first-century access to the archives through databases and digital resources provided by the “older generation of scholars,” made everything and anything fair game for the literary historian as long as one could make the connections (94). Yet, they explained, there was at that time in 2004 another shift in the works, a swing back to formalism and appreciation of the aesthetic object of the text without analysis of its cultural and historical contexts. Richetti’s choices for the Blackwell history may be an indication of which approach has dominated during these fifteen years since the 2004 ASECS: both, working together. Richetti’s History does not choose sides in this alleged tug-of-war between the historical and the formal. Richetti’s corpus, which includes essays like “Formalism and Historicity Reconciled in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones” in Narrative Concepts in the Study of Eighteenth-Century Literature (2017), has proven there is room for both, and this volume acknowledges archival recoveries and offers those works the same close reading of form that it provides mainstays like Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe (1681) and Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1712, 1714).

It is worth noting how Richetti’s volume is situated within the development of its own genre, the ambitious period overview. His attention to both cultural-historical contexts and aesthetic form is in contrast to some of the earliest approaches to the broad literary survey. This genre is anchored by studies like Roger Philip McCutcheon’s Eighteenth-Century English Literature (1949), Geoffrey Tillotson’s Augustan Poetic Diction (1964, republished in 2014), and Tillotson, Paul Fussell, Jr., and Marshall Waingrow’s Eighteenth-Century English Literature (1969). McCutcheon’s first sentence characterized its approach: “the course of English literary history from 1700 to 1789 was affected only slightly by the rulers or by political events” (3). It would be difficult to imagine a scholar saying this in the twenty-first century. The accepted narrative in this foundational appraisal, and in Tillotson’s look at Augustan diction, was that the works of the period demonstrated constraint, conformity, clarity, reason, judgment, and good sense, and that as the century—referred to by those common descriptors “Augustan” and “neoclassical”—proceeded, faith in reason diminished. As far as coverage goes, McCutcheon covered only the canon, with fourteen chapters on Milton, Defoe, Addison and Steele, Swift, Pope, Richardson, Fielding, Johnson, Boswell, etc. In their critical introduction to Eighteenth-Century English Literature, Tillotson, Fussell, and Waingrow were already moving a bit away from McCutcheon and conceding to the importance of the historical, and they opened their volume with the observation that “the eighteenth-century English mind was created by the reaction to the civil disorders of the seventeenth century” (2). But while their anthology did discuss revolution and secularism, its historicist work was not bold. It also did not attempt to account for the diversity of voices during the period. Of 96 authors included, only two were women (Anne Finch, with three poems represented, and Mary Wortley Montagu, with one, and there is a question mark after her name in the table of contents, as if her authorship had been uncertain). Those decades of twentieth-century scholarship, when broad surveys began to appear, were formalist, and they were written with great certainty. Tillotson was confident in his ability to read the (male-only) poets’ minds and guess what they “wanted”: “This is how they saw external nature when they wanted to,” he writes, and “when a poet like Milton takes up a fashion, he does so because he wants to,” and “both Pope and Thomson use fish and birds whenever they want to” (17, 20, 21). They were also certain about how their contemporary readers approached the texts: “It is still true that most readers of eighteenth-century poetry approach it by way of nineteenth-century poetry” (Tillotson 23). Their readers, like the eighteenth-century writers they included, were a uniform, un-diverse group: white, mostly male, highly educated, trained in the traditions of poetry, and in agreement about a canon quite narrow by today’s standards.

When Richetti sheds terms like “Augustan” and “neoclassical,” he is pushing against the tradition of McCutcheon and Tillotson and the longstanding assumptions that they propagated. Richetti’s survey more reflects the thinking of essay collections published since the 1980s, like Laura Brown and Felicity Nussbaum’s The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature (1987), though he does not name that book directly. Brown and Nussbaum argued for scholars to engage in critical pluralism and called out the eighteenth-century studies community’s resistance to New Historicism and theory more broadly, compiling a convincing, polemical, alternative survey that scholars at the time, including Jerry C. Beasley, found shocking but persuasive. They, and their authors, proposed alternatives to the accepted canon and introduced new approaches to familiar works; for instance, Michael McKeon reconsiders Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel from a Marxist perspective. Not coincidentally, Richetti also appeared in this collection with a chapter on the working class and the novel form, “Representing an Under Class: Servants and Proletarians in Fielding and Smollett.”

The section of the History that most clearly demonstrates Richetti’s commitment to educating new scholars about the diverse range of voices now accessible because of the archival labor of the past couple of decades is the fourth chapter on “Eighteenth-Century Verse, IV: Women, Workers, and Non-Elite Poets.” This chapter is clearly possible because of the thinking Richetti had already done for Brown and Nussbaum’s collection. That all women, working class writers, and the “non-elite” must appear together in a kind of catch-all chapter is a point of critique—one could argue that each of these populations deserves as much space as Pope, Gay, and Swift, who share their first chapter only with one another. However, although it is only one chapter, Richetti covers an impressive number of writings that will be new to most readers, including those up-to-date on new findings in eighteenth-century verse. For many of these newcomers to the eighteenth-century timeline, Richetti offers the same close reading and context that he provides for the canonical works. Not all of the poets in this chapter represent eighteenth-century verse at its best (“Read, if you can stand them,” some lines of Lawrence Eusden, Richetti jokes), but he includes many examples of occasional verse and explains its importance for the public (133). John Hawthorn, Edward (Ned) Ward, Tom Brown, and Stephen Duck receive suitable attention, though one might take issue with his assertion that Ward’s poems deserve “no analysis or commentary; they speak for themselves, they are transparently open in the simply bawdy pleasures they offer” (140). Of the women, Richetti shows how a defiant Mary Collier corrects Duck’s pastoral imitation, how an intense Ann Yearsley captures the complexity of female poetic networks, and how a lively, witty Mary Leapor “articulates a hard-edged contempt for male oppression as well as a fine eye for telling lyric detail” (144). Scholars will surely be adding Yearsley and Leapor, at the very least, to their syllabi.

Within this fourth chapter, Richetti makes an important declaration that is regrettably buried: “Among the unfortunate side effects of early twentieth-century poetic modernism has been the mystification of poetry so that ordinary folk (and even well-educated people, in my experience) consider verse beyond their abilities and comprehension” (141). The first three chapters on verse, as well as this one on working class and female poets, work toward that demystification. Richetti moves rigorously, but accessibly, through Pope, Gay, Swift, Prior, Addison, Defoe, Finch, Montagu, Thomson, Johnson, Gray, the Wartons, Collins, Smart, Watts, Goldsmith, Churchill, and Cowper, pointing out what is “striking” and at times “alienating” about the period’s poetry (93). Of Defoe’s verse, which has only recently inspired the attention it deserves, Richetti notes that it is “preeminently a vehicle for self-promoting publicity and satirical self-dramatization that are in the end interesting as signs of his aggrieved and truculent personality” (72).

Verse is arguably the strength of Richetti’s History, but the chapters on prose fiction and nonfiction have several highlights. He begins with acknowledgement of the influences of French amatory fiction and the force of female readers and writers in the publishing market. To begin with erotic pulp fiction, and Eliza Haywood’s “wildly popular” novels, is obviously to break away from the chronology of Ian Watt (157). From there, and with brief comparison to Haywood’s Idalia: or The Unfortunate Mistress (1723), Richetti looks to Roxana (1724), Moll Flanders (1722), and Robinson Crusoe (1719), with attention to Defoe’s complex protagonists and the socio-historical contexts that motivate their behaviors. The section does not offer any revelatory new readings for seasoned Defoe scholars, but it provides a helpful overview of identity formation across the author’s three novels. Readings of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747-8), Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1749) and Tom Jones (1749), and Smollett’s Roderick Random (1748) and Peregrine Pickle (1751) are largely summative but, again, provide informative sketches and model close reading for scholars new to the period. It is entertaining to follow along with Richetti as he unpacks a scene; at one point, after recounting a moment in Tom Jones, he cries out, “One wonders whether Fielding wants us to believe that Northerton has a conscience!” (207).

The experimentation of the mid-century novel, the subject of Richetti’s seventh chapter, effectively captures the spirit of change after the 1750s. In his examinations of Samuel Johnson, Laurence Sterne, Henry Mackenzie, Horace Walpole, Oliver Goldsmith, and Frances Burney, Richetti focuses on the surprising turns that the novel form took, the unpredictability of its legacy, and the playfulness of its conventions, always under scrutiny and ripe for parody. Keeping with the lively tone of the History as a whole, Richetti emphasizes the pleasure of reading the later eighteenth-century novels, for modern readers, and the importance of reading for pleasure during the period itself. “There is a large body of sophisticated commentary on Tristram Shandy,” he notes, “that grants the book profound philosophical and socio-historical significance,” but that scholarship “minimize[es] its playfulness and emphasiz[es] its existential implications and socio-historical bleakness” (231). What that scholarship misses, he suggests, is recognition that whimsy and bawdiness could be ends unto themselves. This is not to say that Richetti dismisses all existential considerations of his representative works. The chapter ends by questioning the popularity of Burney’s extended portrayal of female suffering of Cecilia and then, in a fitting conclusion of the novel portion of the survey, answers that question: “What is distinct, however, about Burney’s rendition of this archetype is that her suffering is inextricable from the socio-historical circumstances of her time as rendered by the novel, the weight and dead hand of those massive inheritances and the manipulations and betrayals by various characters that attend them” (252).

Of prose nonfiction, Richetti discusses familiar letters, biography, history, the periodical, literary criticism, and political and polemical writings, in many cases returning to authors featured in the verse and prose sections. Each overview of a genre provides representative examples and close readings; his analysis of Defoe’s A Weekly Review of the Affairs of France and of All Europe (1704-13) is particularly helpful in understanding that author’s complicated politics and the influence of his activist writings. The chapter ends with commentary on the intensity of Edmund Burke’s prose style, in particular the relatively ignored eloquence of his speeches arguing for the impeachment of Warren Hastings. These speeches may well be unknown even to experts of the period, and they are worth adding to twenty-first-century syllabi.

Drama is not covered in as much depth in this Blackwell history as verse and prose. Richetti has an impossible job here with just one chapter to cover the Restoration and after. He gives more attention than other surveys to the importance of tragic drama during the early decades, and he bridges the moral backlash against the raucous comedies of the seventeenth century with the sentimental melodrama of John Gay, Henry Fielding, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Oliver Goldsmith. Female playwrights could have been better represented in this overview, however, and while the Restoration historical context is detailed, one could use a similarly nuanced sense of the overall transformation of the stage after the 1720s.

Richetti’s History of Eighteenth-Century British Literature, as classroom tool, partners well with volumes such as Penny Pritchard’s The Long 18th Century: Literature from 1660 to 1790 (2010) and Charlotte Sussman’s Eighteenth-Century English Literature, 1660-1789 (2012). Each of these volumes offers a different set of tools for the undergraduate and graduate student. Pritchard educates readers about details that instructors might fail to mention but that help beginning readers of the period’s literature better understand characters and situations. For example, Pritchard begins by emphasizing how deferent British citizens were to categorizations of status. Lower classes would move to the side to allow higher class citizens to walk by the wall, and seating in churches was by rank. This constant reminder of one’s superiority or inferiority, Pritchard notes, caused great tension and competition across the century, and transferals of power within economics, politics, religion, and even family life influenced the period’s art. Sussman takes up with Pritchard’s cultural analyses but frames her history with the concept of selfhood, tracing the period’s literary developments as they reflect changing notions of private and public identity in print culture, geography, religion, sexuality, sensibility, and colonialism. She focuses on relationships and on the ways in which identities were grouped and “Britishness” emerged as an identification. What Richetti adds to Pritchard’s persuasive focus on class and Sussman’s expert articulation of eighteenth-century selfhood is a succinct and conversational narrative that students as well as educators can read in full or as excerpts circulated in courses covering various genres and figures. It is a good source to consult as one returns to their syllabus for the survey of eighteenth-century literature, looking for works they may have forgotten or hoping for new finds that can diversify and complicate the narrative of the period that seemed so clear to McCutcheon and Tillotson.

Katherine Ellison

Illinois State University

WORKS CITED

Backscheider, Paula R. and Catherine E. Ingrassia, eds. British Women Poets of the Long Eighteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2009.

Baines, Paul, Julian Ferraro, and Pat Rogers, eds. The Wiley‐Blackwell Encyclopedia of Eighteenth‐Century Writers and Writing, 1660‐1789. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.

Beasley, Jerry C. “Review of The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature by Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown.” Modern Language Studies 20.1 (1990): 115-117.

Fairer, David and Christine Gerrard, eds. Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Edition. 2^nd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.

Gottlieb, Benjamin. “Review of PennSound Anthology of 18th-Century Poetry.” Jacket2. https://jacket2.org/category/commentary-tags/john-richetti.

Lonsdale, Roger, ed. Eighteenth-Century Women Poets. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.

McCutcheon, Roger Philip. Eighteenth-Century English Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1949.

Pritchard, Penny. The Long 18th Century: Literature from 1660 to 1790. Harlow: York Press, 2010.

Richetti, John. “Formalism and Historicity Reconciled in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones.” Narrative Concepts in the Study of Eighteenth-Century Literature. Ed. by Liisa Steinby and Aino Mäkikalli. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2017. 79-98.

—–. “Mastering the Discipines.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 2013 (46): 460-63.

—–. “Representing an Under Class: Servants and Proletarians in Fielding and Smollett.” The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature. Ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown. New York: Methuen, 1987. 84-98.

Sussman, Charlotte. Eighteenth-Century English Literature, 1660-1789. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012.

Tillotson, Geoffrey. Augustan Poetic Diction. New York: Bloomsbury, 1964.

In the final chapter of his debut book, The Wreckage of Intentions, David Alff calls Gulliver a “convener of equine counterpublics” (163). This turn of phrase is just one flash of the subtle and necessary humor that occasionally surfaces in Alff’s study of Restoration and early-eighteenth-century projects that never came to fruition. To find what Alff is capable of finding in the rich and varied archive that undergirds his book—to practice what Alff calls the “hermeneutics of salvage”—requires a gentle and lighthearted sympathy for so many failed projectors whose writing we might otherwise dismiss as quackery or detritus (8). As Swift the self-satirist well understood, we shouldn’t be completely ruthless toward breathless projectors—proposers of schemes for improving this or that, usually driven by profit motive—because you never know when the proposer might be you. Alff seems to understand this too, which allows him to capture both the necessity and the tragicomedy of failed projects.

The Wreckage of Intentions sets out to “restore the remarkable early modern life of an idea today mired in anodyne ubiquity,” and argues that by taking account of the necessarily future-oriented genre of projection, we can “interpolate present-day readers as residents of early modernity” and “reimagin[e] what was once dreamt as a sign of that culture’s understanding of itself and capacity to change” (19, 8). Central to Alff’s approach is adept close-reading of both historical sources and capital-L or “imaginative” literature: pamphlets, advertisements, satires, plays, poems, and prose fiction all get careful treatment in the book.

Alff moves toward his central argument by breaking the process of projection into logical and clearly defined stages that give the book its structure, anchoring each stage in an illustrative case study. First, Alff argues, projects must be envisioned, projectors’ authorial personas constructed, and projects put to paper (Chapter 1). Then, printed texts of projection must be circulated to give the ideas a foothold in the world (Chapter 2). Finally, a critical mass of readers must be motivated to transform words into action, to “undertake”—in the early modern parlance that Alff carefully parses—a “performance” meant to bring projection to fruition (Chapter 3) (91-2).

The first chapter tells the tragic and at times gripping story of Andrew Yarranton and his England’s Improvement by Sea and Land (1677), a capacious example of improvement literature, “a bricolage transformation of professional fluency into persuasive resource” (26). Here we learn that one of the key features of the genre Alff calls “project writing” is its attempt to persuade both skeptics and decision-makers in a competitive marketplace not only of the soundness of the plan, but of the credibility of its author. This forms the basis of Alff’s incisive observation that Yarranton’s text, whose rhetorical conventions were meant to make the proposer appear disinterested—not a “projector” in the pejorative sense in which the term was used in the seventeenth century—is “a text at war with its medium” (43). That is, project writing plays up technical, matter-of-fact angles in an attempt to forestall the accusation that projectors only write to ingratiate themselves and flatter their grandiose plans. Yarranton’s is a fascinating case study worth reading about, not only because of the rhetorical moves he makes in England’s Improvement, but also because his life itself—and its shocking end—reflects so clearly the mix of vigor and tragedy that projection entails.

Having established a number of rhetorical conventions of project writing as a genre—disavowal of self interest, demonstration of technical acumen, passive voice—Alff moves into Chapter 2 with the purpose of showing how print media could transform projectors’ written ideas into viable possibilities for action. As Alff tidily puts it, “Print rendered projection a tangible event even though—and precisely because—so many schemes failed to leave the page” (59). The primary subject of Chapter 2 is the poet and miscellanist Aaron Hill, who also happened to be the mastermind behind a beech tree oil scheme, which promised to harvest beech oil for food, fuel, and other uses, for the betterment of the nation. To what I expect will be the delight of all readers of The Wreckage of Intentions, Alff even uncovers a newspaper advertisement in 1715 that brags of the superior quality of domestically harvested beech oil to “Foreign Oil,” which provides new context for twenty-first-century discussions of petroleum tariffs (80). Hill issued free pamphlets on his beech oil venture to generate interest and to prove he was not profiteering, a telling example of Alff’s argument about the role of print in shepherding ideas to the stage at which, as Alff writes, readers might “stop reading about beech oil and begin making it themselves” (71).

The third chapter, on the various schemes to drain the Fenlands of east Anglia, focuses on Cornelius Vermuyden’s drainage plan, submitted to Charles I in 1638, and published four years later as A Discourse Touching the Drayning of the Great Fennes. In a detailed historical account of the actual labor involved in drainage attempts—and the ways the reality of the undertaking diverged from the vision in Vermuyden’s Discourse—Alff demonstrates the third stage of projection, the attempt. He relates this stage to the prior stages of writing and circulating through a clear explication of the usages of the terms “project” and “undertaking” in the seventeenth century. Though today, as Alff observes, we frequently use these terms interchangeably, then “the latter term usually meant the carrying out of the former” (91). By providing examples of this distinction in seventeenth and eighteenth-century writing, Alff shows that projects imply but do not constitute future undertakings, and that when projects make it to the undertaking stage, the contrast between project and undertaking is often informative.

Alff turns from the processes of projection and undertaking to more expressly literary examples of project writing in Chapters 4 and 5, on the Georgic mode and the literature of antiprojection (mainly Gulliver’s Travels) respectively.

Chapter 4 enters longstanding scholarly discussions about what caused the proliferation of Georgic verse in the eighteenth century (beyond Dryden’s issuing of The Works of Virgil in 1697). Alff’s argument here—that in foregrounding the imaginative possibilities for how agricultural improvements could transform rural life for the better, the Georgic was also spurred by an abundance of project writing on agricultural improvement—is convincing and well researched. Of particular interest is Alff’s refreshing new reading of Pope’s “Windsor-Forest” as a kind of Georgic-inspired improvement literature, in which Alff reads Pope’s poem alongside the history of projects focused on Windsor Forest itself.

Likewise, Chapter 5, a useful survey of antiprojection literature centered on Gulliver’s Travels, offers a fresh and compelling new reading of Swift’s frustrating and frequently criticized third part of the Travels. Reading the survey of Balnibarbi and the Academy of Projectors as a satire on the logic of projection, “confront[ing] the logic of projects themselves by addressing the individual stages through which enterprise moved from mind to world: language, publication, and undertaking,” Alff does as well as anyone to place part three logically in line with the rest of Gulliver’s Travels. That is, by showing how part three is a satire on the logic of projection, Alff is able to show further how Travels is a text in which, as Alff tells us, Gulliver is continually exposed to projects, but never sticks around to see what comes of them (147). This opens up promising readings of Swift’s satire in Gulliver’s Travels as more broadly driven by concerns about projection.

Alff closes his study with a coda on Defoe’s A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724) as an example of where Defoe turns retrospectively to “a Proposal made a few years ago,” on the settlement of the Palatines, an issue that history had already passed by (166). In this skillful final gesture, Alff takes Defoe’s bittersweet return to an idea that never got off the ground as emblematic of the value of the study of such projects. As Alff writes, “Defoe’s project sunders time, unzipping a split plot between realist travelogue and imaginary forecast.” In this way “the anticipation of action” in such projects “endures through the act of reading” (177).

In the end, I’m left with a critique, a question, and a note of gratitude for this outstanding book. The critique is that one of the Restoration’s most industrious projectors, William Petty, gets only a single footnote in Alff’s study. Yet Petty’s longstanding interest in what he and others called the “multiplication of mankind”—schemes to increase the national population to become more economically competitive on a global scale—strikes me as a significant failed project worth our attention. As Paul Slack has recently documented, Petty’s essay on “the multiplication of mankind” went unfinished, as Petty continually delayed it for lack of a solution. It was, as such, projection that came to nothing. The inclusion of Petty might also have opened up fruitful possibilities to read what looks much like the rhetoric of objectivity presented in project writing against comparable rhetoric of the Royal Society more broadly. This is particularly the case for Chapter 1, where Alff discusses Yarranton’s desire that England keep up with its Dutch rivals, also a preoccupation of Petty in his “political arithmetic” essays, and an impetus for “multiplying mankind.” The question is also about (fittingly) what might have been: was Margaret Cavendish a projector, and is The Blazing World (1666) project writing? Finally, the note of gratitude for Alff’s study is just that: it’s one of the best written and most compelling academic books I’ve read in recent memory. This book will certainly be of interest to scholars across the disciplines of literary studies and history of the early modern period, and more broadly to scholars of any period interested in historiography. The histories and literature Alff illuminates are enough to make this book rewarding, but The Wreckage of Intentions also poses important questions about how we construct our archives, and how we do literary history itself.

Aaron Hanlon

Colby College

The cover of Joseph Drury’s Novel Machines handsomely reproduces an engraving of a watchmaker hard at work, together with diagrams of a clock’s movement and illustrations of his tools and workspace. This beautiful image might lead an unsuspecting reader to imagine that clocks and gears play a prominent role in his account of the mechanisms of the eighteenth-century novel. But this would not be quite right. Drury’s argument asks us to embrace a broader understanding of the term machine; his book has little enough to say about watches, but a great deal to say about electrical equipment, celestial beds, coaches, and glass harmonicas. It also, to be sure, has a great deal to say about the genre we call the novel, which Drury argues was understood in the eighteenth century to be a machine itself. For eighteenth-century novelists and critics, the novel is much like any other mechanical contrivance intended to improve human life: “Once regulated by a modern philosophical method, the novel could become as useful a machine as an air pump or a microscope” (85). In the time of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, the term “machine” could be broadly applied to any human contrivance that was susceptible to rational improvement. Natural philosophers in the Baconian tradition sought to transform the practical, hand-built knowledge of the mechanical arts into higher forms of knowledge through rationalization. Similarly, the novel in Drury’s account is a device that required improving, and that, when functioning properly, would improve human life. What might still be understood as analogy is, in fact, quite literal; in this period, many thinkers were coming to understand the world and the people that inhabited it in mechanical terms. As Drury notes, “neoclassical authors soon came to the conclusion that narratives were also machines and that they too were (or ought to be) governed by a corresponding set of fixed, universal ‘rules’” (27-28). Francis Bacon’s understanding of history and natural philosophy as progressive were increasingly built into this period’s fictions of personal improvement.

Drury makes clear that his project in this book is distinct from earlier treatments of the novel as a technology in a Foucauldian sense. Critics such as John Bender, taking inspiration from Michel Foucault, once treated the novel as a literary incarnation of a disciplinary mechanism that sought to instill docile forms of subjectivity in readers. On the other hand, more recent discussions of the novel in relation to technology have emphasized a range of more benign understandings of technology as a means of communication or of entertainment, wonder, and pleasure. Drury suggests that neither of these approaches is quite adequate. Instead, his argument turns to ideas drawn from the field of science and technology studies, invoking critics such as Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour who have emphasized a constructivist, non-determinist theory of technological development. However, he also draws from approaches associated with Don Ihde that insist that technologies can be decontextualized, to some degree; a technological innovation does have a form that “mediates” human perception and action (10). This nuanced and powerful approach allows him to discuss genre as a machine: a set of conventions and contrivances that emerge from a specific historical moment, but that produce effects independent of that moment.

Drury’s argument proceeds chronologically, with each chapter (after the introduction and the stage-setting first chapter) focused on a specific technical innovation in narrative, contextualizing that innovation not only through skillful readings of the novels but also in relation to other technological innovations and to shifting ideas about bodies, narratives, and their mechanical relationship. His second chapter, for example, considers the libertine fictions of Eliza Haywood as Hobbesian-inflected explorations of the relationship between reason and passion. For Haywood, novels as fictions can only appeal to the passions: Haywood’s fictions operate by creating attractive portraits of virtuous behavior, and by cultivating fear of punishment or suffering for bad decisions. This is mechanism in a decidedly Hobbesian sense; human decisions emerge not from a free-floating subject of reason but from a mechanical contest of power within the passionate mind, and this understanding of the subject gives shape to her fiction. Reading of Love in Excess (1719) in this context, Drury argues for Haywood’s original contributions to theories of libertinism and mechanism as compatible with free will and moral responsibility; emphasizing the role of the deliberating consciousness, she “exposes the cynicism of the libertine’s claim to be a blameless automaton and shows that his failure to deliberate results not from the intensity of his passion … but from the pervasive double standard in attitudes towards male and female sexual behavior” (54). In the process, Drury notes, she also treats the machinery of her fiction as a tool for instilling autonomy and moral agency in young women.

Drury’s next stop is Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749). Older accounts of the British novel as centered on realism and empiricism have sometimes had difficulty shoehorning Fielding into their accounts. Drury’s approach, however, allows us to reconsider Fielding’s self-conscious literary techniques in terms of the novel’s mechanics. In Drury’s reading, Fielding’s fiction emerges from a set of assumptions that links contemporary fiction—“romance”—to lowbrow theatrical practices that emphasized spectacle and mountebankery. Fielding seeks to associate his own fiction not with romance, then, but with realism and scientific practice. To make this association, Fielding has recourse to a narrator who comments on and exposes the novel’s own narrative machinery. This narrator can be understood as akin to the enlightened scientific practitioner/educator who must distinguish himself from the “quack,” just as Fielding’s narrator is at pains to distinguish himself from romantic writers and hacks. Drawing on recent work that emphasizes the centrality of display, performance, and wonder in the production of scientific truth, Drury reminds us that “showmanship with spectacular machines helped make scientific knowledge real” (86). But this reliance on the spectacular also threatens to undermine science’s credibility as an independent and rational arbiter of knowledge. Fielding’s self-conscious narrator, then, plays the role of the educator who creates spectacle but does not deceive; all his “tricks” are explained and marshalled in the use of education and improvement.

This chapter is followed by a study of Stern’s Tristram Shandy (1759-67). This particularly interesting chapter is concerned not, as one might expect, with Sterne’s obsessive treatment of clocks, miniature cannons, and gynecological tools, but rather on the coach. Sterne’s narrative method, Drury argues, can best be understood as a response to contemporary concerns about speed. Tristram’s narrative, seen in this light, is a literary response to the rapid production and consumption of novels as commodities; his narrative of frustration is an attempt to thwart this tendency and to promote a more mindful, patient form of reading. For this urge, the speeding carriage is a useful figure, and Tristram’s transportation troubles in book VII are a particularly powerful figure for his urge to thwart the culture of speed.

The final chapter deals with Ann Radcliffe’s fiction. Again, Drury eschews low-hanging fruit: we might expect to find deceptive mechanical contrivances discussed here, since devices for creating visual illusions (such as the magic lantern) have often been associated with Radcliffe’s fictional method. Drury instead turns to Radcliffe’s use of “acousmatic sound”: the use of mechanical contrivances to produce sounds that seem to be ambient and environmental rather than emerging from a specific source. According to Drury, the quasi-acousmatic sounds produced by devices such as the Aeolian harp and the glass harmonica were linked to an aesthetic of expression that identified the purpose of literary and musical arts as “to excite powerful emotional responses and stimulate the pleasurable reverie that occurs when the imagination searches for a specific idea to which those emotions might correspond” (146). Drury reminds us that Radcliffe wrote in an era when medicine often described the human body as a vibratory mechanism, made up of threads or chords; such medical models also often demonstrated concern that the modern vibratory body would be overstimulated by the consumption-driven world of commerce and aesthetic overstimulation. Drury ably argues that Radcliffe’s frequent use of sound in her gothic fictions is related to this tendency. Gothic narratives and ethereal music alike were thought to “transport the mind out of itself and reconnect it to the vital natural forces from which it had become alienated by modern arts and sciences” (146). Her fictional incorporation of atmospheric musical machines is a distillation of sorts of her aesthetic ambitions: to return the soul and body to the tranquility associated with imaginative practices.

As any productive scholarly project will, this work raises many questions no single monograph could answer. One such question would be the applicability of this mechanical paradigm to other fictions of this period. Drury is of course well within his rights to shunt aside many innovative writers of fiction from this period—Daniel Defoe and Charlotte Lennox make only brief appearances, for example—and his location of women as central to the development of the novel more accurately reflects our understanding of the development of fiction in this period. Readers of this journal, though, might find it intriguing to consider whether Defoe’s fictional innovations can be described in the mechanical terms that Drury outlines. Defoe was, as we know, highly interested in questions related to modernity and progress. And, indeed, the front-jacket blurb on this book gives pride of place not to the protagonists of Haywood, Sterne, or Radcliffe, but rather to Crusoe and his mechanical transformation of his Island of Despair. Much of Defoe’s fictional canon could perhaps be assimilated to a framework that understands the novel as a technology for national and self-improvement. However, all books must end somewhere; if some questions remain, that is a testimony to the fruitfulness of Drury’s method and the engaging nature of his argument.

Christopher Loar

Western Washington University

Sweepingly ambitious from the outset, Leah Orr’s book proposes “a new way of approaching literary history” that uses new technologies “to study all printed texts” from the years mentioned in her title (4). Her book is an important, original, and even path-breaking attempt to turn literary history into a social and essentially quantitative science; her method is rigorously and neutrally descriptive rather than evaluative, although some conventional “literary” analysis does creep in as she seeks in due course to account for the enduring popularity into the eighteenth century of books like the first part of Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) and Richard Head’s The English Rogue (1665) and several others. Oddly enough, she considers the popularity of Head’s book as owing to its skillful writing and careful construction. She notes that the 1688 version is “streamlined” and achieves “narrative cohesion through its consistent narrative voice” and thoughtful plot that renders the hero, Meriton, a developed character (127-28). Such analysis is alert but obviously it is evaluative literary criticism rather than notation of publishing facts. To some extent a moment like this qualifies Orr’s description of where literary history is trending.

For her, “modern scholarship is increasingly open to re-discovering popular works by ‘minor’ authors” or even by anonymous producers of narrative texts, since literary historians, as she puts it, have turned to “studies of the reading public and book history rather than just a few examples of literature of a high artistic caliber” (11). Indeed, authorship in these years, she argues shrewdly, is “a marketing tool, used to attract readers to texts based on the creation of a ‘brand’ name of the author but otherwise little regarded” (99). Orr notes, doubtless correctly, that anonymous texts would have been chosen for purchase by late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth-century British readers for their content. Thus one of Orr’s strongest points is that in choosing narrative texts by authors they admire, modern literary historians “are applying a twentieth-century view of the importance of authorship backward onto eighteenth-century readers” (99).

But Orr’s dismissal of evaluative literary history strikes me as an overstatement. I don’t share her enthusiasm for turning literary history away from literary achievement by individual authors. Moreover, by no means have all literary historians (I include myself) made that turn. Some readers of this review may know that I began my scholarly career as a graduate student in the mid-sixties by reading what I called (somewhat misleadingly) “popular” fiction in the early eighteenth century, the thirty-nine years preceding Richardson’s Pamela (1740). As I explained rather plaintively in the introduction to the 1992 paperback reissue of my book, Popular Fiction Before Richardson: Narrative Patterns 1700-1739 (1969), I spent two years in the British Library reading this material, suffering from their crudity and tedium and wishing I had been studying literary masters such as Pope or Swift or Johnson. Orr, by contrast, finds that literary history of the early novel suffers from its exaltation of a small number of texts in what she labels fairly contemptuously as “developmental histories of fiction, from McKillop and Watt to McKeon and Hunter” (14). In contrast to such an evaluative perspective, Orr proposes to examine in a totally neutral, non-judgmental spirit the databases of early fiction we now have and to find what eighteenth-century readers seem to have liked and bought. She positions her work as occupying the firmest of ground, what she calls “facts about print culture and book history” (15), as she cites reprints and reissues and similar concrete evidence of popularity with those readers. Obviously, she is a book historian more interested in readers and booksellers than in authors; she scorns the critics who have promulgated what she labels a “great man” theory of literary history that has sought “the origins of a fictional movement that culminated in Robinson Crusoe or Pamela” (26). I would counter that this is not really what such literary critics claim, since Defoe’s and Richardson’s novels are more or less in their historical moments sui generis, dramatic, transformative, genuinely original departures from their narrative contemporaries and predecessors. If that makes them “great men,” so be it, since some do achieve greatness.

Orr’s method is essentially taxonomic, and her genuine if to my mind limited usefulness for students of the English novel lies in her rigorous classifications of fictions in these years. The large middle section of the book has four chapters that divide texts neatly and efficiently: Reprints of Earlier English Fiction, Foreign Fiction in English Translation, Fiction with Purpose, and Fiction for Entertainment. Her aim is to evoke far more exactly and carefully than literary historians and critics have the shapes and purposes of fiction or narrative for its readers from this period and to describe what readers at the time would have thought that they were encountering. She affirms that such readers would have accepted the claims to veracity in many of these narratives, which therefore were not approached as novelistic in our double sense of an untrue story that delivers truths about human experience. And she goes further when she asserts that works of fiction were not “advertised to appeal to learned or cultivated audiences,” and booksellers “did not think their customers were discriminating in their taste” (59). This is the language of “marketing,” and that in fact is what much of her study is about. And further she notes that the only books most readers could afford were “chapbooks, jests, and fables” (59). But then in a curious contradiction Orr says that “the subject matter and prose of such works were usually not unsophisticated” (60), which seems to be an odd way to call them in fact “sophisticated.” Her conclusion from this somewhat confusing set of assertions is that such books were also purchased by people who could afford more expensive books, “and so bridged the economic and social barriers that prevented most people from accessing the longer narratives purchased by wealthier people” (60). How the reading of chapbooks by affluent people helped poorer folk to bridge socio-economic barriers is a mystery I cannot solve.

This is a rare puzzling moment in Orr’s book, which is generally straightforward, lucid and unpretentious almost to a fault. Her version of literary history is positivistic and literal-minded; she looks at publishing data and tells us, for one example, that Elizabethan fiction reprinted in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries “was very different from what is now most frequently studied,” dominated in literary history by Nashe and Sidney, with some Deloney (124). But is she really recommending that we and our students read the truly popular works such as “the choppy chivalric tales Parismus and Montelion and the easily excerpted moralistic adventures of the Seven Champions and the Seven Wise Masters” (124)? I am not certain what is gained for literary history by pointing this out, except that readers in those years without much education or sophistication preferred these works. It strikes me that Orr is not writing literary history (indeed her book is a polemic against it as it has been practiced in the current critical understanding of the emergence of the novel in English) but rather publishing history. Thus she points out that many Elizabethan fictional works were reprinted for more than a century, but that earlier seventeenth-century works by and large were not, while works from the latter end of the century continued to be printed in the early eighteenth century. A whole sub-section of her fourth chapter traces the “Reprinting of English Fiction Originally Published 1610-1660” (125-32). Of course, there is no arguing with these facts, and they are worth pondering. The question is, rather, what do these facts prove that is of interest to literary history, however one defines it?

Orr’s answer to this question comes in a subsection of her chapter four, “Reprints of Earlier English Fiction,” in which she notes after surveying the most reprinted texts in the early eighteenth century that “some frequently reprinted books, such as Gesta Romanorum or The History of the Five Wise Philosophers, are almost never mentioned in modern criticism of early fiction” (140). That does not strike me as a scandal. What does a collection of medieval anecdotes like the Gesta have to do with early fiction except as an instance of older taste for miscellaneous and curious tales? Undeniably, such works were indeed popular, and Orr finds the beginnings of an English canon of fiction in works “that found continuous favor, like Sir Bevis of Hampton, Guy of Warwick, and Jack of Newbery,” as well as The Pilgrim’s Progress and The English Rogue (140). Except for Bunyan’s book, these titles will be of interest only to specialized scholars, and I suppose that Orr is correct in reminding us of what might be called the “pre-canon” of English fiction. And yet one might respond that such a pre-canon is important precisely for the qualities that Defoe and Richardson may be said to have rejected or indeed transcended as their works begin the formation of the canon of English fiction we have now.

I am grateful to Orr for her hard and exceedingly careful work; she has illuminated a dark part of the early history of English narrative. Her book is informative and at times provocative. But she proposes a form of literary history that is essentially quantitative rather than qualitative, and that in my view is only a part of the story of the emergence of the novel in England.

John Richetti

University of Pennsylvania

Joining the excellent recent monographs on eighteenth-century science studies by feminist scholars, including Melissa Bailes, Laura Miller, Courtney Weiss Smith, and Helen Thompson, Tita Chico’s The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment does no less than offer a landmark contribution to both literary studies and the history of science and technology.

By attending to issues of literary form, gender theory, and cultural studies, Chico reveals how scientific discourse—with its self-consciously anti-aesthetic claims of objectivity—has always relied on literary tropes and technologies from across the generic spectrum. Indeed, a core claim of Chico’s book is that during the emergence of the new science across seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, literary knowledge was actually the more privileged intellectual and epistemological category precisely because it served as “a form of practice” that “makes material possible. Literariness is itself a form of making” (5). Through this set of priorities, The Experimental Imagination exhumes from the archives the consistent presence and participation of women—as objects of study for early modern scientists, yes, but also as active creators of literary and scientific knowledge. By foregrounding this revised notion of literary knowledge and reconsidering the role of women and early modern cultural forces in the origins of natural philosophy, Chico radically reformulates key concepts and long-held assumptions established by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985) and related claims about realist literary forms, thus opening up a new set of considerations for scholars of these fields.

Chico’s titular term “focuses our attention on the literary qualities of experimental philosophy as a mode of knowledge acquisition that redefined the natural world as well as the individual who understood it” (17). To that end, her introduction offers a strategic set of four keywords (literary knowledge, science, trope, and gender) that outline how her study re-theorizes previous work in the field. “Science is a literary trope” that was, especially in the early decades of the Royal Society, reliant on the flexibility of literary knowledge to address the early “epistemological uncertainty” of experimental practice and written accounts of it (5-6). Although the term “reflection” is not a formal keyword, it is nevertheless significant: Chico asserts that critics must move away from anachronistic claims of science’s inevitable epistemological triumph over its “debased sibling, literature” (8-9). Even more, Chico suggests, critics ought to reconsider whether and to what extent written works from the period actively represented any such fixed disciplinary divide between literature and science. The final two keywords, “trope” and “gender,” most explicitly underscore the range of The Experimental Imagination’s formal and theoretical commitments. Chico observes how the dynamic capacities of the trope were appealing to early modern scientists and literary authors, as they mined figure and metaphor to stake their epistemic claims. Gender is an equally powerful category that early modern writers used to frame an “architecture of social connections” to buttress intellectual and cultural notions of authority (11). Rather than echoing the common lament about the ways in which masculinized science erased the female subject into a dehumanized object of study, Chico adds new life to the conversation about science and gender by showing the generative possibilities of the embodied nature of scientists, especially as it relates to women’s participation in the experimental culture of the period. By focusing on the figurations inherent to the experimental imagination, Chico’s project reconsiders scientific subjectivity and “insist[s] on the body, particularly the scientific body, [as] the legitimate scientific body.” In so doing, she offers “a powerfully feminist rejoinder” (12) to scholarship that has too readily accepted claims of so-called objective, disembodied, and disinterested men of science without seeking a more nuanced account of women’s presence in literary-scientific discourse.

In the chapters that follow, Chico’s study explores the interplay among these keywords to compelling effect. Chapter one builds upon Shapin and Schaffer’s claims about two components of early science’s literary technology, the observed particular (which Chico has discussed eloquently elsewhere) and the modest witness, and argues that notions of early science’s tropic possibilities—particularly those connoting modernity—saturated the literary and cultural milieus of the long eighteenth century. The chapter contextualizes this early modern literary-cultural setting by reading accounts from Samuel Pepys’s diaries and Thomas Sprat’s apology for the Royal Society, showing how experimental philosophy enabled both figures to “imagine themselves and their worlds anew” (25). Shifting to the genre of the scientific report, chapter one then offers a revelatory reading of how the experimental imagination operates in Robert Boyle’s The Christian Virtuoso (1690). Here, Chico analyzes how Boyle tries out several different metaphors—a sponge, a stretched bow, and finally wool—to explain air’s elasticity, or its spring. This narrative description of air’s “wooliness” offers to readers a reassuringly familiar image in the face of an unseen phenomenon. But it is no random choice: it also suggests “the cornerstone of [England’s] national and patriotic economy [that] encourages readers to think of Boyle’s experiments with air as especially English” (30-1). These sorts of readings beautifully complement and build upon works by Thompson and Weiss Smith: where Thompson emphasizes the importance of imperceptible phenomena, corpuscles, in creating literary and scientific knowledge, Weiss Smith contextualizes Boyle’s deliberate use of analogical thinking as both a scientific and religiously devotional practice. In all three cases, the authors insist on the necessary imbrication between literary form and scientific claim.

The observed particulars that accompany such metaphoric imagery require sustained acts of the reader’s and writer’s imagination and an overall process of imagistic compilation that combine to represent an object’s “true form.” The agent who makes the protocols of the observed particular possible, the modest witness, is yet another component of the experimental imagination, a figure created when scientific narrative instrumentalizes the scientist’s body in order to obscure the scientist’s own embodiment. It is not the scientist, but rather the disembodied “sincere Hand and faithful Eye” (39) that performs experiments. While this scientific blazon can never fully erase the embodied nature of the scientist, it amplifies the sense of wonder that accompanies scientific inquiry and discovery.

Chapter two theorizes the immodest witness as a literary-cultural figure that upends any fixed claims of scientific objectivity. Turning her attention to the stage and the periodical, Chico identifies two categories of the immodest witness, Gimcracks and coquettes, and claims that their disingenuous social performances ironically reveal (as they attempt to mask) their self-interested motives and their inescapable social and affective ties, both of which are often filtered through a sexualized commodity culture. Chico’s innovation here is to focus on two case studies in what she calls the afterlives of Thomas Shadwell’s Gimcrack: Lady Science in James Miller’s The Humours of Oxford (1730) and Valeria in Susanna Centlivre’s The Basset Table (1705). While Lady Science is a foolish “scientific Mrs. Malaprop” (54), the play must disarm her potentially subversive powers as an independent, wealthy widow, first by subjecting her to a humiliating foiled amatory plot, and ultimately by having her reject scientific practice entirely. By contrast, Centlivre’s Valeria, a fashionable and learned scientific virtuosa, has no such financial independence, but she finds a sense of identity outside of and beyond paternalistic claims on her body and future through the practice of science. Coquettes are “social and epistemological problems: they invite attention yet thwart inspection” and are more threatening than their male analogue, the beau, because they promise to disrupt “the economy of sexual relations and patriarchal authority by refusing to subject [themselves] to its rules” (64-5, 67). Chico’s analysis shows how Eliza Haywood’s proto-feminist periodical The Female Spectator rewrites and “recuperates the coquette through her practice of experimental philosophy” by making the Female Spectator and her acolytes not passive objects of scientific inquiry but rather active practitioners of it (68-9). These are no Lady Sciences: they, like Valeria, are fashionable members of society whose very training in the mores of modern society makes them expert scientific observers who, through inquiry and practice, demonstrate their good taste.

The topic of immodest witnesses beautifully segues into chapter three, which considers how the literary technologies of science inculcate systems of belief in their audiences through the seduction plot. The chapter’s opening anecdote cites a scene from Haywood’s Love in Excess (1719) in which Melliora’s reading of Bernard de Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralite de mondes (1686) captivates her married guardian, D’Elmont, and catalyzes their affair. This coupling of science and seduction, borne out between characters with unequal power and agency, is no mistake: this is a Baconian tradition that depicts “scientific practice as heteronormative, erotic quests” (77). Such quests establish the scientist’s authority as they educate and promote belief on the part of the reader. Troubling the parameters of consent, scientific seduction plots “stage power relations among unequal participants, conjoin sexual desire with a desire for knowledge, narrate a character’s changing state and status, and imagine affect as epistemology” (78-9). Chico considers the interplay between Fontenelle’s text and another continental work, Francesco Algarotti’s Il Newtonianismo per la dame (1737) and two translations of these works by Aphra Behn and Elizabeth Carter, respectively. The translations allow Behn and Carter to assert their own epistemic and aesthetic authority and the broader claim that natural science is within the purview of feminine education, an assertion that resonates with Bailes’s and Miller’s studies on popularizations and translations of scientific treatises. Chico insists on the importance of the dialogue as a form of scientific seduction, since the genre is steeped in a tradition of education wherein a learned man persuades and often reforms a female interlocutor. Fontenelle depicts a dialogue between a natural philosopher and a marchioness discussing the nature of the cosmos; Algarotti’s work appropriates this structure and reframes the conversation to focus on Newtonian optics. In both works, the participants are doubly seduced, by one another and scientific theory.

Science’s rhetorical and cultural power receives further treatment in chapter four, which reinvigorates standard discussions of scientific state power as represented in Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1667), Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666), and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Chico focuses on how the different generic qualities of each author’s work—manifesto, romance, and satire, respectively—register concerns about the politicized, gendered, and colonial dimensions of the British state’s instrumentalization of science. In the wake of the Civil War and its aftermath, Sprat and Cavendish both concern themselves with the dire consequences of political factionalism. For Sprat, science is a means of uniting opposing political bodies by producing obedient and gentlemanly scientific subjects (111-12). For Cavendish, however, while scientific discourse might increase political discord domestically, its colonial use reaffirms and expands state power (121). For both Restoration-era writers, the metaphoric capabilities of the experimental imagination make these iterations of state scientific power possible; importantly, such scientific practice becomes a compensatory mechanism that assuages these authors’ concerns about further civic discord. With the distance of more than half a century and in response to the explosion of Britain’s increasingly violent colonial endeavors, Swift essentially inverts this formula: scientific theory and practice is absurd in its theory and much of its practice, but when imperial scientific metaphors are literalized into political practice, they devolve into debased and sinister acts of oppression. Chico offers astonishing readings of Books III and IV of the Travels through her painstaking focus on Swift’s use of the word “thing” and its philosophical basis in Houyhnhnmland, the rejection of figurative language, exemplified most overtly by their locution of “the thing which was not.” For Chico, this term indicates the society’s “apparent unwillingness to think imaginatively. . . . The metaphorics of the Houyhnhnm language demand literalization” (129). If in Book III the bags of symbols and objects that the scientists carry allow Swift to reduce the Royal Society’s phrase nullius in verba into absurdist humor, in Book IV’s debate about the extinction of the Yahoos at the Grand Assembly, such an impulse is at once authoritarian and genocidal: “Voyage IV exposes the ideological and ethical dangers of believing that reason is perception. The repetition of a debate about genocide, in a purportedly civil society that insists things just are, reveals the imperialist politics at the core of instrumentalized reason” (132). The topics of chapters three and four may resonate all too uncomfortably with the current international political climate.

Chico’s final chapter documents the capacity of poetry to provide what she calls “aesthetic mediations” about natural philosophy that “draw on but also challenge the intellectual processes of science, reimagine subjectivity, and mount a case for the superiority of the literary” (137). Crucially, the aesthetic is a moral category that parallels the modest witness, insofar as both require an imagined, idealized viewer of the observed particulars of the natural world. Chico then shows how poetic works like Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1712) actively employ the protocols of natural philosophy to create art, all the while reflecting critically on both as imaginative acts. The process of narrating this mediation, Chico argues, reveals the “uneasy balance between material and theory that constitutes the observed particular in natural philosophy” (167) and elevates the literary-aesthetic observer above science’s modest witness. Take, for instance, the titular lock of Belinda’s hair. Looking through Hooke’s microscope, audiences would see the hair’s follicles and read an attached narrative description that combined a multitude of observed particulars into one unified object that appears frozen in time. Pope’s depiction of Belinda’s hair, by contrast, uses this microscopic eye to obsessively detail its transformations over time: the lock changes throughout the course of the poem descriptively (it is by turns a single curl, and multiple curls) and symbolically (it represents Belinda’s chastity, her commodity consumption, and the poem itself). Pope’s epistemology of things uses literary and aesthetic concerns to offer a fuller account of the materiality of the world, a narrative process that Chico documents in poems published in the Gentleman’s Magazine to celebrate the scientific objects of Queen Caroline’s Hermitage and in James Thomson’s The Seasons (1726-30), which overlays on this process an anxiety of excess prompted by colonial endeavors.

Chico’s study offers a timely, relevant, and consistently exciting set of arguments that promise to transform the fields of eighteenth-century cultural studies, studies of the major literary forms of the eighteenth century (with a focus on poetry, plays, and the periodical), and the history of science. The Experimental Imagination’s theoretical and methodological lenses serve as a call to arms for scholars of these fields to perform more nuanced intersectional work that will productively explore how issues of race, gender, and power amplify, echo, and inform literary-scientific discourse in the later eighteenth- and early nineteenth centuries and beyond.

Danielle Spratt

California State University, Northridge