Go to a fine arts or textiles museum and you might see an exhibit with noses pressed against the display windows. Behind the glass? Doll houses—shrunken buildings, rooms, furniture, tea sets, and other objects from daily life, most often produced during the English long eighteenth century, and wondrous for their attention to detail. Imagine, for a moment, the miniature cup and saucer, that little book, the tiny bed, all to scale. Imagine, too, the sense of familiarity and difference, the recognition and the wonder that such miniature things evoke in the viewer. Melinda Alliker Rabb’s learned Miniature in the English Imagination: Literature, Cognition, and Small-Scale Culture, 1650-1765 takes up the heyday of such objects’ manufacture, a period that specialized in producing miniature material objects as well as narratives focused on small things.

Rabb’s focus is not on the small, say, of the flea magnified by the microscope, but on the miniature. In that difference resides the force of Rabb’s insights: miniature things are produced, not discovered. Miniatures are things, as in the sense of Bill Brown’s thing theory—that is, miniatures re-objectify objects and, in so doing, short-circuit the original thing’s connotations. But miniatures have an additional quality that distinguishes them from things as such. Miniatures are replicas.

Through technologies of scale and instrumentation, as well as cognition, miniatures allude to their originals, while also producing uncanniness. And in the space of that uncanniness, Rabb finds the work of cognition. While Susan Stewart’s 1993 On Longing is a touchstone, the nostalgia Stewart sees bound up with small things only tells part of Rabb’s story. These are things in the sense of thing theory, but they are also symbols (a term Rabb works to recover), revealing what cognitive scientists call “symbol-mediated experience” (23). Rabb’s theory of the miniature and its psychological import relies upon developmental psychology that studies how the real is a form of representation. Turning to the praxis of cognitive science, Rabb joins scholars such as Blakey Vermuele, Lisa Zunshine, and Jonathan Kramnick interested in the sciences of the mind. The symbol-mediated experience differs from the effects of similitude—as one finds, Rabb argues, in the language of John Milton or Robert Hooke—by focalizing four concepts that animate many of her readings: dual representation, representational asymmetry, scale error, and spatial knowledge as mediated not experienced. Miniatures, in Rabb’s analysis, help us make sense of the larger world.

The star of this book is Jonathan Swift, whose Lilliputians are its urminiatures, appearing throughout its pages and the literary culture it studies. Gulliver’s Travels is about scale, as readers have recognized from the beginning, but Rabb argues that Swift’s satire is likewise about the dislocation miniaturization produces, especially in Gulliver’s sense of himself. Lying on his belly and peering into the Lilliputian palace is merely one of Gulliver’s encounters with miniatures in the first voyage, a “symbolic artifact” that at once invites him in (the peering) and refuses entry (he’s too large). By book’s end, Rabb argues, Gulliver’s breakdown is not attributable to the sort of fracturing of the psyche that Jonathan Lamb identifies in Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680-1840, but instead to a desire to “defy the inherent asymmetry of symbolization” and turn himself into a horse (64). For Rabb, the voyage to Houyhnhnm does not need to replicate the cognitive work of miniaturization dramatized in the first two books because its patterns are so well established. The Houyhnhnm table (around which they gather) corresponds, symbolically, to the Brobdingnagian table and also to the Lilliputian table. In replicas of domesticity, Swift locates the psychology of being human.

Much of the book takes us through familiar literary terrain—Swift, Johnson, Pope, Sterne—and even with that, one wonders what Rabb would do with, say, Margaret Cavendish. There are especially vivid moments when Rabb takes us to new places. The turn to trade cards is one such example. The discussion ultimately leads to readings of Pope’s The Rape of a Lock, Robert Dodsley’s The Toy Shop, and Robert Gay’s The Fan, but on its own offers a strong look at miniaturization in print culture with explicit ties to material culture. We learn that a trade card from 1760, for example, for Thomas Jaques, Dealer in Ivory, Tortoiseshell, and Hardwoods (reproduced in the volume), features a small tortoise and miniaturized elephants across from an elegant woman, an association that Rabb suggests is a pointedly commercial context for Pope’s own alchemical transformation of the toiletry accoutrement on Belinda’s dressing table. And perhaps the most engaging exegesis of the miniature comes in a discussion of early experimental practice. Building on Lisa Jardine’s work on the scale models in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural philosophy, Rabb turns to the miniatures designed and built by William Petty, Robert Hooke, John Theophilius Desaguliers, among others—and her research into this mostly lost object of material culture is impressive. The scientific miniature made visible experimental praxis, playing a central role in the myriad demonstrations available in the London commercial and intellectual marketplace.

As I thought more about Miniature and the English Imagination, I came to see that this is a book about uncanniness as cultural memory. Miniatures record the displacement, in Rabb’s formulation, of a century’s worth of calamities into a fascination and preoccupation with miniaturization. The cascading upheavals of the seventeenth century—political, demographic, geographic—cast a long shadow over the eighteenth. The shrinking of things into objects that lose their utilitarian value results in objects that remember but also refigure those losses and injuries. Miniatures, in Rabb’s understanding of them, reminds one of Joseph Roach’s theory of surrogation in Cities of the Dead. Roach operates in a different key—that of performance in eighteenth-century London and in twentieth-century New Orleans—but makes the important point that “Much more happens through transmission by surrogacy than the reproduction of tradition. New traditions may also be invented and others overturned. The paradox of the restoration of behavior resides in the phenomenon of repetition itself: no action or sequence of actions may be performed exactly the same way twice; they must be reinvented or recreated at each appearance. In this improvisational behavioral space, memory reveals itself as imagination” (28-29). The “much more” of Roach’s surrogation points to what Rabb characterizes as the “indirection and transference through which societies negotiate ideas difficult to confront whole and entire” (31-32). Miniatures record those social negotiations. At a moment of expanding British naval, colonial, and political power, Laurence Sterne gives us a patriarchal line that is dying out. Uncle Toby’s fortifications in Tristram Shandy both displace his war injury and facilitate his cognitive errors. They offer details, but not the sort that preoccupy and proliferate in the mind of Tolstoy’s Prince Andrei, mapping on to an every wider panorama. Uncle Toby’s war shrinks and compresses.

War, the plague, London burning, regicide—these are the problems that ultimately lie within miniatures. The scope, then, of Rabb’s analysis pushes us to see the miniature as a replica of something that both is and is not, a material object that catapults the beholder into the symbolic, uneven territory of self-knowledge and self-delusion.

Tita Chico

University of Maryland

“What sort of outside is the certain sign that there is, or is not such an inhabitant within?” (cited in Thompson, 100). John Locke (or, at least, the outward signs of him) poses this question in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Arguably, this question is one that also concerns artists—and perhaps more urgently than philosophers. After all, as Tristram Shandy observes in Laurence Sterne’s account of his life and opinions, it is the fact that “our minds shine not through the body” that keeps storytellers in business, earning their supper by conjuring outsides and insides that seem plausibly to fit together (53). In Helen Thompson’s view, this project—conjuring insides and outsides in ways that at once invite and frustrate our efforts to fit them together—unites empiricist philosophy and the genre of the novel in the eighteenth century. Her recent book, Fictional Matter: Empiricism, Corpuscles, and the Novel (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), argues that both empiricism and the novel dramatize the perceiver’s encounter with the sensible while also evoking the presence of that which lies beyond direct perception.

In making this argument, Thompson challenges one of the most entrenched beliefs about both empiricism and the novel: that both put a premium on firsthand experience. As Thompson observes, this view of empiricism is indebted to Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s enormously influential Leviathan and the Air-Pump (Princeton, 1985), which identifies early modern science with the ratification of knowledge according to reproducible acts of witnessing. Scholarship on the novel from Ian Watt onwards has similarly stressed the novel’s commitment to a view of the world grounded in individual observation. Thompson argues, however, that this is an impoverished and oddly literal-minded conception of both empiricism and the novel.

Thompson suggests that if we take a closer look at Robert Boyle’s corpuscular chemistry and its legacy in the thinking of Locke and others, a different picture of empiricism emerges, one that does not, in fact, categorically distinguish perceptible from imperceptible phenomena. Thompson argues that if we think about the novel in dialogue, not with Shapin and Schaffer’s version of empiricism, but with the corpuscular version, a new model of realism emerges that resides, not in the transparent rendering of a stable external world, but rather in making “explicit the production of sensational understanding” (17).

For Thompson, thinking seriously about corpuscular chemistry and its legacy entails rethinking several assumptions about early modern epistemology that have informed how we think about the novel. One of the assumptions we need to rethink is our understanding of secondary qualities. Thompson argues that, for corpuscular thinkers, secondary qualities comprise “both sensory perceptions and corpuscular texture’s power to effect them” (7). In other words, secondary qualities are phenomena that traverse a subject / object distinction that has often underwritten accounts of the novel, its distinctiveness located either in its strategies for representing interiority (Nancy Armstrong) or exteriority (Watt). A second key tenet of corpuscular thinking is that matter’s nature has more to do with texture than with essence. Boyle, as Thompson shows, repeatedly characterizes corpuscles by their texture, a texture of which we are insensible. Thirdly, Thompson argues that the corpuscle’s ontology, unlike the atom’s, is relational: what a corpuscle “is” depends upon the experimental relations that it occupies (43).

This view of matter, Thompson argues, bears both on how we understand early British empiricism and how we understand the novel’s relationship to it. For Shapin and Schaffer, the very condition of empirical knowledge is that its status is not tied to the body of any one individual witness. For Thompson, by contrast, “penetrability remains the enabling condition of empirical understanding” (58). For Thompson, both empiricism and the novel proffer a form of realism that resides not in mimesis but in thinking through the nature of understanding as a “contingently produced event” (3).

Thompson’s Introduction contains a close reading of Hogarth’s Satire on False Perspective (1754) that helpfully illustrates how her emphasis upon understanding not as the passive absorption of data but as an encounter between perceiver and form yields a different view of eighteenth-century fiction. While, for John Bender, Hogarth’s image promotes the viewer’s virtual witnessing, in Thompson’s persuasive reading, the plate does not affirm but rather disrupt realist apprehension—by both triggering and refusing depth, as Thompson puts it (20). In Fictional Matters’ six central chapters, Thompson goes on to show how eighteenth-century novels work in the mode Hogarth adopts in Satire on False Perspective, not transparently rendering the real but rather staging the reader’s encounter with forms that have the power to induce a sensation of the real.

Chapter 1, “Boyle’s Doctrine of Qualities,” develops Thompson’s claim about penetrability as the enabling condition of empirical knowledge. Thompson finds in the example, invoked by Boyle, of a nun pierced by consuming fragments of glass, an avatar of empiricism’s subject. In her body’s porousness, Boyle’s nun runs counter to characterizations of the eighteenth-century empirical perceiver as passive and impenetrable and empiricism’s objects as inert (53-4). By contrast, as Thompson puts it, “Boyle defines the phenomenon of perception as texture’s interaction with texture.” Boylean matter sticks, pierces, and tinges.

Chapter 2, “John Locke and Matter’s Power,” reconceives eighteenth-century fiction’s Lockean heritage, making the case that we discern a Boylean Locke’s impact upon eighteenth-century literature (68). Thompson argues that Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) adopts Boyle’s corpuscular theory of matter but also expresses ambivalence about analogy’s role in describing it. Thompson shows how Locke uses analogy (light as tennis balls swatted into people’s faces by an indefatigable squad of racket-wielding fairies!) to show how such comparisons fail to capture the phenomenon of corpuscularity (74-5). The second half of the chapter turns from the microscopic to the macroscopic, showing how Locke refuses the “morphology of spirit” we encounter in the seventeenth-century textbook, Orbis Sensualium Pictu (1658), instead adopting a Boylean anti-essentialist view of human nature, in which people’s insides and outsides are fundamentally unstable (97, 104). This chapter concludes by reading Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina (1725) and Love in Excess (1719) as novels in which feminine identity does not proceed from an inner essence but rather responds contingently to the male perceiver in ways that, as Thompson writes, derail “the referential consistency of empirical nomination” (110).

Chapter 3, “Morbific Matter and Character’s Form,” considers how one aspect of corpuscular philosophy’s conception of the person informs eighteenth-century ideas about character. To imagine a person as comprised of miniscule parts is also, as Thompson argues, to characterize human bodies as “pervaded by tiny holes”: that is, as porous, or like knitted stockings, in Boyle’s image (113). Thompson argues that this view of the body informed anti-Galenical views of the Great Plague that understood the disease as working upon bodies in imperceptible but nonetheless fatal ways, as exemplified by the anti-Galenical physicians George Thomson and George Starkey, both of whom died as a result of their commitment to handling plague-diseased bodies. This view of persons as radically open to external influences, Thompson argues, informs character’s operation in Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), in which interiority is particulate and dispersed in ways that defy representation. Thompson notes the way in which H.F.’s aim to “fill” his readers’ minds with vivid impressions evokes both a Lockean theory of mind and a Boylean theory of body. In A Journal of the Plague Year, Thompson argues, interiority is formal, which is to say, delimited “by the empirical limits of one’s perception of one’s own corpuscular interiority” (132). H.F. “elaborates the paradox of a thing that is received yet not felt” (143).

In the second half of the book, Thompson turns to consider how corpuscular philosophy’s insistence on matter’s contingency meant that it was not easily enlisted to underwrite essentialist ideas about race, status, and gender. Chapter 4, “Race and the Corpuscle,” ingeniously shows how eighteenth-century fictions by Eliza Haywood and William Rufus Chetwood dramatize the central query raised by Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton’s conflicting accounts of color: are bodies colored in the dark? (146). In Boyle’s account of color, “bodies are always colored in the dark,” because color is perceptible tactilely, according to Boyle’s report of a person who is “Blind,” but can discern color by touch (“Black feels as if you were feeling Needles points, or some harsh Sand, and Red feels very Smooth” (Thompson citing Boyle, 147). Where, for Boyle, color is a “disposition” exhibited by corpuscular texture, Newton’s demonstration that light is responsible for color rendered the question of objects’ color in the dark a moot point. Thompson then turns to how these debates about color informed John Arbuthnot and John Mitchell’s development of non-essentialist theories of race. Arbuthnot, drawing upon Boyle’s ideas about how air molds human bodies, argued that air produces slavishness in some and resistance in others, thereby justifying chattel slavery on the basis, not of essential differences, but rather on the geographically contingent effects of air’s interaction with the human body. An important aspect of Thompson’s argument in this chapter is that the fact that these thinkers did not conceive of race in essentialist terms does not mean they viewed the enslavement of African bodies as any less inevitable. As Thompson puts it, “for Arbuthnot and Mitchell, depth does not harbor essence, but neither can surface assure malleability” (172). Thompson goes on to show how fictions by Chetwood and Penelope Aubin dramatize the risk that travel poses to “white women’s reproductive instrumentality,” a condition that only “resistance,” not corpuscles, can safeguard.

Chapter 5, “Quality’s Qualities: Fielding’s Alchemical Imaginary” shows how Fielding’s fiction dramatizes the novelistic consequences of human surfaces proving an unreliable guide to their essence (192). Like Shamela’s pinch-induced blushes, Fielding’s fiction asks whether words, like secondary qualities, can “be severed from the corpuscular texture by which they should be produced” (208). In Joseph Andrews (date?), Fielding exploits typography (italicizing, for example, Slipslop’s slippages, like Incense for Essence), to foreground how “words evince qualities that oppose the ambition of their users” (213). In the chapter’s final section, Thompson shows how Jonathan Wild (date?) recruits alchemical ideas to encourage the reader to read both the character and the text as performances in which the glittering surface is discontinuous with the baseness underneath.

Chapter 6, “Fixing Sex,” turns to Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748) to argue for Richardson’s engagement with corpuscular philosophy via Locke’s philosophy. Thompson argues that Clarissa’s purity is complicated by Richardson’s reliance on a corpuscular theory of breath “that undermines her metaphysical difference” (233). According to corpuscular scientists James Keill and Stephen Hales, exhaled particles coalesce, creating a grossly close atmosphere within enclosed spaces like the brothel-keeper Mrs. Sinclair’s bedchamber. Contaminated air sullies Clarissa to the extent that her expiration becomes inevitable, Thompson argues. Clarissa’s virtue cannot be fixed in matter because, as a disposition rather than an essence, it is as vulnerable to change as any other secondary quality.

Thompson’s Epilogue, “Denominating Oxygen” extends this insight into characters’ and corpuscles’ shared dispositional quality to modern chemistry and novels. Reading Lavoisier’s identification of oxygen as an irreducible element alongside Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), Thompson shows how empirical knowledge continues to implicate both perceptible and imperceptible qualities. Lavoisier named oxygen in recognition of its acidifying qualities, qualities that are imperceptible (275). Thompson persuasively argues that, like Lavoisier’s oxygen, Austen’s novel characterizes entities by their dispositional qualities (Darcy’s “hauteur”; Wickham’s “charm”)—qualities, that is, defined by the impressions they make on the perceiver—in ways that prevent a distinction between subjective and exterior states.

Fictional Matter’s corpuscular perspective opens up a new way of seeing both empiricism and the novel, and convincingly grounds that vision in a particular discursive tradition. Thompson’s idea of fiction resonates with Jacques Rancière’s articulation, in Aisthesis (2011), of a “new idea of fiction” in which the object of mimesis is not characters or events but rather “the very forms in which sensible events are given to us and assembled to constitute a world”; in other words, “what is imitated … is the event of its apparition” (100). But where Rancière explicitly identifies this paradigm as a post-eighteenth-century innovation, Thompson shows how such a notion of fiction proceeds from the assumptions and language of corpuscular philosophy. Thompson’s ability to inhabit the language of corpuscular philosophy and put that language in dialogue with twentieth-century theory is both what allows Fictional Matter to make its argument so effectively and also what makes it challenging to read for someone not steeped in these discourses. Like the corpuscular matter it describes, Thompson’s prose is intricately knitted in a way that requires but also rewards close and sustained attention. At a time when, for better and worse, the pressure to make scholarly writing more widely accessible is stronger than ever, Fictional Matter shows why subtle arguments can demand specialized language and, in so doing, demonstrates the intellectual rewards of leaning into learnedness.

Sarah Tindal Kareem
University of California, Los Angeles

WORKS CITED

Sterne, Laurence. Tristram Shandy. Ed. Howard Anderson. New York: Norton, 1980.

J. A. Downie’s new volume on the eighteenth-century novel is an excellent addition to the Oxford Handbook series, and his expansive approach to the subject is welcome. Thirty-four chapters by different contributors cover a range of subjects, from the impact of individual authors (Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Austen) to subgenres of fiction (travel, sentimental fiction, the Gothic) to cultural background (social structure, class, religion). Downie has adopted a liberal definition of both “eighteenth-century” and “novel,” covering works published from 1660 to 1832 and in a wide variety of fictional modes not always discussed in books on “the novel” proper. The book includes survey-style chapters by Peter Hinds, Michael F. Suarez, S. J., John Feather, and Peter Garside describing the book trade context in broad strokes, and many of the essays in this volume take an interest in looking at what was published and read rather than what coalesced later into a literary and cultural canon. While the reader will find here chapters discussing the major authors and texts found in many literary histories, these subjects are re-contextualized in ways that are much more representative of current critical perspectives on eighteenth-century fiction than one might expect from the Oxford Handbook series.

An examination of how Defoe surfaces in this text provides an example of its treatment of major authors. There is one chapter focusing on Defoe, but instead of a standard survey of the usual novels, David Oakleaf’s “Testing the Market: Robinson Crusoe and After” looks at the print contexts in which Defoe’s most famous work was published, showing that Defoe “occupied the cultural margins” (177). Much of the chapter compares Crusoe to contemporary works like Love in Excess and immediate successors, including the usual suspects (Gulliver’s Travels, Moll Flanders, Roxana) but also a range of novels that traditionally received less attention in literary histories (The Jamaica Lady, Idalia, The Life of Madam de Beaumount, The Noble Slaves, among others). Besides this chapter, readers interested in Defoe will find his work covered elsewhere: a discussion of “Robinson Crusoe as Spiritual Autobiography” in W. R. Owens’s chapter on “Religious Writings and the Early Novel”; the influence of Defoe’s A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain in Cynthia Wall’s “Travel Literature and the Early Novel”; a reading of Roxana and The Secret History of the White-Staff as political secret histories, by Rebecca Bullard; the changing influence of the frontispiece to Robinson Crusoe in Robert Folkenflik’s essay on illustrations in novels (116-119; 124-25; 144-46; 309-313). Defoe’s influence on the novel form here includes his work in other genres. In short, the story of the novel is no longer the story of a few exemplary works by Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and a handful of others, but these are instead integrated into a much more encompassing history of the genre.

Many of the essays do well in including texts that could garner more critical attention and provide new avenues for research. Thomas Keymer shines a light into some forgotten corners of the late seventeenth century, pointing out the many works of fiction published in England before Robinson Crusoe (and mostly not reprinted in the eighteenth century or later). Chapters by Peter Sabor and Tim Parnell, while focusing on Richardson and Sterne respectively, devote much of their space to the fictional contexts and responses to Pamela and Tristram Shandy, showing that these novels did not emerge or succeed in a literary vacuum, but were part of a diverse fictional world. For the late eighteenth century, Geoffrey Sill’s examination of sentimental fiction and M. O. Grenby’s look at “The Anti-Jacobin Novel” show that even well-studied categories have more diversity than has often been acknowledged.

Along the way there are some important points that would be well considered more thoroughly by scholars of the novel. Suarez points out the surprising but true fact that “If we consider the century as a whole, then the two most popular novelists (by numbers of editions printed) are Defoe and, remarkably, Goldsmith” (27). As he emphasizes, reprints mattered to how fiction was received and understood in its time, and the works that were most reprinted are not those we might expect based on the canon as we see it now. Walter L. Reed, in his survey of French fiction in England, reminds readers that “a number of influential French books of the period were published in French in London and distributed abroad from Britain,” and some French writers were living in England, much as some English writers were in France (82). Cross-channel textual exchanges were important, and appear in several essays in this collection. On the book history side, Antonia Forster reports that “Although there is little evidence that readers paid much attention to reviews, it is clear from the mass of advertising and attacks on reviewers that booksellers and authors thought or feared that they did” (384). This caution should give us some pause in thinking about how we approach reception history for this period, even with well-documented cases. Readers were as diverse as authors and books, and there were surely a wide variety of opinions.

While the nature of the Oxford Handbook series means that many essays are attempting to synthesize a critical field rather than propose a new intervention, a few stand out for innovative takes on old subjects. Brian Cowan’s “Making Publics and Making Novels: Post-Habermasian Perspectives” acknowledges the influence of Jürgen Habermas’s theory of the public sphere on the intellectual history of the eighteenth century while showing its shortcomings. He charts a new direction for scholarship that more fully acknowledges “a pluralistic process of interest formation” that includes multiple publics and recognizes that “print must be placed within the broader context of a diverse and extensive media culture” (61; 63). Gillian Dow’s chapter on the influence of French novels is a welcome reminder of the extensive, under-studied influence of French fiction, both in translation and in its original, on eighteenth-century English readers and writers. Readers will similarly find that Simon Dickie’s account of “Novels of the 1750s” covers a great deal of under-explored territory, showing new directions for research and pointing out the chronological and generic gaps in teleological accounts of the rise of the novel—not the least of which is the long-lasting popularity of works like Robinson Crusoe, which continued to be reprinted and read alongside new works (256). For the later eighteenth century, Lisa Wood also focuses on the under-studied trend in the evangelical novel, which she argues has been overlooked because “its aesthetic effects are less important than its capacity to effect change in the reader”—and many of them were written by women writers, for an audience of young people (526). In examining texts by Hannah More, Mary Brunton, and Barbara Hofland, Wood introduces an important counterpoint to the works of William Godwin, Mary Shelley, and Elizabeth Inchbald that have become more canonical. In these essays (and others in this volume), readers will find a fuller sense of the eighteenth-century novel than is to be found in previous literary histories and a wealth of new texts that deserve closer scrutiny.

While this book covers so much that it is difficult to point out gaps, there were a few missed opportunities. The book history chapters provide helpful context for the interpretive chapters, but present their facts as a field already well-covered, and do little to point out directions for future research on the print culture contexts of novel writing and publication. For a book on genre, there is relatively little formalist discussion of how novels work, beyond the hazy distinctions from the period between romance, novel, and factual writing. Jan Fergus’s thoughtful chapter on Austen and realism is one of the few extended discussions of narrative style. In some places one feels that the contributors might have benefited from reading each others’ work: Habermas is thoroughly discredited in one chapter, but elsewhere invoked relatively uncritically, for example (207; 349). Some essays repeat older critical views about periods covered in this book other than the one their authors were familiar with. Some essays repeat older critical views contradicted by other essays. One essay on late eighteenth-century fiction, for example, comments that, “From the early eighteenth century, novels suffered a tradition of evoking elite sneers. These neophyte novels are mainly adventure tales,” but this broad claim does not concur with the discussions of the diversity of early eighteenth-century fiction found in the earlier chapters in this volume (356).

One book cannot do everything, and this one covers an enormous territory with due attention to the parts of this field that have often been overlooked. For a book of this type and size, with this many contributors, there are relatively few contradictions between chapters, and all the essays are current with the scholarship in their field, with a few standout chapters suggesting ways to move forward. This book is accessible enough to be read by undergraduates but advanced enough to be of interest to those who study or teach this subject. It provides a snapshot of current thinking on the subject, with some new directions for further study. On the whole, Downie has done an exceptional job of bringing together an impressive range of scholars and embracing the richness and diversity of fiction as it was actually written, published, and read by people in the long eighteenth century.

Leah Orr

University of Louisiana at Lafayette

At some point, while reading Aaron R. Hanlon’s A World of Disorderly Notions: Quixote and the Logic of Exceptionalism, it will occur to you—as it occurred to me—that the author might just be tilting at windmills. Armed with an argument, that quixotism is formally like an exceptionalism, and that exceptionalisms haunt the threadlike microgenre of the Quixote-narrative, Hanlon finds quixotes (and exceptionalisms) everywhere he looks, at least when it comes to the literature of the eighteenth century. Some of his instances seem unexceptionable. No one would doubt that Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote is indebted to the tale of the Hidalgo; and it would take a Quixote of a different order to deny that Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry is a through-and-through rewrite of Don Quixote. Some seem plausible but less clear. Though critics remain split on what to make of Henry Fielding’s claims of indebtedness to Cervantes, there is enough in Parson Adams and Tom Jones of the man of La Mancha to value the comparison. Smollett’s case is similar; his Launcelot Greaves seems to lean on lessons learned in Smollett’s early-career translation of the Quixote. But a skeptical reader will be less persuaded that Gulliver’s Travels is a Quixote narrative—even if its eponymous hero at times practices the sort of unreflexive patriotism which is one possible hallmark of the quixote abroad. The same skeptic might wonder if other texts shouldn’t meet the criteria of Hanlon’s capacious category of the Quixote narrative—why not Samuel Johnson in the Hebrides, or Robinson Crusoe, or Yorick in Sentimental Journey, who takes up the question of national exceptionalisms in the book’s opening sentence and never quite lets it go?

For Hanlon is a bit of a Quixote himself, wonderfully and deliriously. How could it be any different? What else could a study of quixotism be, I mean quixotism as a genre, if it did not build in a tendency to systematize, a general drive to reduce everything that more or less fits to a latter-day instance or echo of Don Quixote? Treating quixotism as a genre or as a “character canon” means plucking out a few features distributed across texts and clumping those texts together as a tradition, especially a tradition with a particular job to do. And this, Hanlon establishes, is the formal essence of quixotism: quixotism is the effort to argue from the exception, to fit a world of evidence to a single pattern or idea. For the Hidalgo, this single, generative matrix is Romance; he elevates Romance to a transformative principle, reorganizing an inn as a castle, a maid as distressed royalty, windmills as giants. For Hanlon, it is quixotism and the related genre of the picaresque, each instance of which articulates a precise exceptionalism of its own. “Exceptionalism,” in Hanlon’s words, “produces for quixotes a self-sealing logic,” what Niklas Luhmann would call a system. Gulliver offers Hanlon a first (and most difficult) instance; Gulliver’s quixotism lies in his inattention to the foibles of England, which he repeatedly overlooks even when they are explicitly pointed out to him. The King of Brobdignag is appalled at English behavior, calling the nation a race of vermin; Gulliver simply cannot see it this way. This categorical, phenomenological interpretive impulse is what Hanlon tabs Gulliver’s “English exceptionalism,” which insists on the “idealism” of the imperial project even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Something similar, Hanlon argues, obtains for the heroes of The Algerine Captive, Joseph Andrews, Modern Chivalry, The Female Quixote, and so on, each of whom “accomplishes… the daunting task of conceptually reshaping the material world around [them] according to fictional representations.” Each hero, we might say, articulates their own particular exceptionalism, an exceptional exceptionalism in every case: from Hanlon’s first two case studies, “Gulliver and English Exceptionalism” and “Underhill and American Exceptionalism,” to the last, “Marauder and Radical Exceptionalism” (of James Marauder in The Infernal Quixote, 1801). Each hero carries their singular vision on a sort of journey, Parson Adams (Chapter 7) continually misinterpreting the world according to his own, naïve simplicity, or Arabella (Chapter 8) longing for a better, purer world than the marriage market she is about to enter—and almost bringing it into being by force of example alone. And one gets the sense that this could go on forever, limited only by the examples Hanlon finds (or transforms) with his expert eye. “The exceptionalism of quixotes,” Hanlon writes, “becomes the engine of their character inexhaustibility”—or of their critical inexhaustibility, as the case may be.

But, again, if you’re like me, there will come a twist where you will become at least a little sympathetic to the argument, possibly even a convert. This is the upshot of Jorge Luis Borges’s claim about Don Quixote: that details of the plot and action are less important than the narrator’s (and the reader’s) relationship to his hero. At some point, some time after the windmill episode, the narrator no longer treats his hero like a madman. He is won over. He begins to prefer Don Quixote’s vision to that of the realists he encounters. This thereby opens the opportunity for a reader to do the same. For Borges, this transformation occurs slowly. But it is signaled at key interpretive moments, when (for instance) Don Quixote discovers that others in his world have read the first part of the novel in which he appears. They compare the Hidalgo’s tale to a rival’s imitation, offering criticism which might in fact bear an uncanny resemblance to the thoughts the reader has already had.¹ A similar moment occurs, notes André Brink, near the end of the book, when Don Quixote visits a publishing house and finds in the press the sheets of something purporting to be his story, the compositors outstripping even the life of their biographical subject in their race to get his story to the bookstalls (21).² Here, too, the book frames itself as its own question, when the familiar crisis between reality and illusion, between the humdrum “reality” of everyday Spain and the book-world of Romance, is unmasked instead as a predicament between criticism and belief. Put differently, it is when the novel stages itself as the finished opportunity for a choice between a dreary routine of bookish skepticism and the incandescent vision which Don Quixote puts in practice.

Hanlon’s book pulls off more than a few such moments, framing a choice between the skeptical impulse of any professional critic and the seduction of an interesting argument. One such moment of choice is posed as early as the preface, when Hanlon notes that he was asked the same skeptical question every time he presented a talk or circulated a workshop paper on quixotism in eighteenth-century Britain. Someone, inevitably, would ask him if he weren’t merely “tilting at windmills.” Well, that would have been me. It was me, as I was reading: I anticipated Hanlon, in the sense that I myself was thinking just the same thing, only a paragraph earlier, or, Hanlon anticipated me, in the sense that my very thought, in my very words (which were the very words of a shared tradition, the thing you know about Don Quixote if you know nothing else), was lying in wait, like a ward or evil eye, in the text I thought I was criticizing. And what I thought was a witty first effort to start penning this review was maybe actually just the interpellation of a lowbrow critical tradition; I was signaling my identification with a conservative variety of critical practice, the bland doing of criticism that looks always to reduce a book or a poem or a critical practice to a single apposite phrase, what Elisabeth Camp calls a “frame.” I had identified, if I may put it this way, with the reality of criticism against the romance of argument, leaving criticism, especially of the skeptical sort, looking suddenly humdrum and ordinary—the kind of stuff done in a DoubleTree conference room under dingy acoustical tiles, or over a wedge salad lunch at the regional ASECS. “Yes,” someone might say (I might have said), “but isn’t he just tilting at windmills,” ha ha.

So, there are two alternatives with this book, two approaches or responses, and reading it means choosing a side. In the first, the author has become seduced by his vision, which is, formally speaking, that of Cervantes. Reading Hanlon’s book this way is to accuse the critic of lapsing into the style of his object, of becoming “a quixote.” Hanlon wouldn’t be the first critic to begin mimicking the style of his subject. I am reminded of Martin Battestin, who, over the course of a career on Fielding, perfected an arch irony and performative distance that is more than a little reminiscent of the narrative voice in Tom Jones. You might think of Samuel Johnson’s Tory prose welling up in the work of latter-day Johnsonians, a habit catalogued, even while being affectionately modeled, in Helen Deutsch’s Loving Dr. Johnson. Or you might think of the half-performative, half-apotropaic “Style” of D.A. Miller writing on Jane Austen—a variety of critique as identification summarized by Frances Ferguson as “too-close reading.” The skeptical reader might therefore add Aaron Hanlon to the list: another bright critic seduced by his subject, who now ranges the archive transforming everything into a picaresque. In the second, however, Hanlon has taken up the thread dropped by Don Quixote himself. Indeed he has perfected it, in the sense that Don Quixote, like Arabella in The Female Quixote, ultimately recants, a plot twist which most modern readers experience as a betrayal. Hanlon doesn’t recant. He doubles down. While the penultimate paragraph of the book contains a partial list of the Quixote narratives which, like the original, end with a reversal—Gulliver’s Travels, The Female Quixote, and, in a different way, Female Quixotism—Hanlon prefers instead to look forward to the political stakes of a correct understanding of quixotism, which he finds in modern-day political exceptionalisms, in the legacy of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, and so on. We are all, by this account, quixotic, to the extent that we identify with an idea.

I hope it is clear by now that I count myself in the second set, that the book takes the invitation offered by Cervantes and extends it to the micro-genre that has sprung up in direct debt to his original. Hanlon has succeeded in offering a philosophical explanation of the Quixote-genre. I will just mention that what Hanlon calls quixotism, another scholar, like Frederic Bogel, might call satire, or satire as it looks in a first-person narrative. These perform similar, “double-edged critiques” (73), of their objects and of the world they stand against; they form communities of interpretation, especially in the ironic mode perfected by Swift; they offer an alternative, the possibility of sympathetic identification or realist critique. Framed somewhat more capaciously, therefore, the quixote-narrative looks like a species of satire, and Hanlon’s study will appeal to scholars of that genre. But even read narrowly, this is a book to be admired. It will become a valuable addition to studies of quixotism and the genre of the Quixote, a genre, I have been suggesting, which this inspired book both explains and extends.

Sean Silver
Rutgers University

WORKS CITED

Borges, Jorge Luis. “A Recovered Lecture of J. L. Borges on Don Quixote,” trans. Julio Ortega and Richard A. Gordon, Jr. INTI 45 (1997): 127-33.

Brink, André. The Novel: Language and Narrative from Cervantes to Calvino. Cape Town: U of Cape Town P, 1998, 21.