Category Archives: Reviews2020

The Cambridge Companion to “Robinson Crusoe,” edited by John Richetti

J. A. Downie

The title of this volume is of interest: it is indeed a companion to Robinson Crusoe rather than a collection of critical essays on Defoe’s most famous narrative. There is comparatively little discussion of the actual text: Part I, “Robinson Crusoe and Daniel Defoe: The Eighteenth Century” offers information on various contemporary contexts for Defoe’s narrative; Part II considers “Robinson Crusoe in the Wider World;” while Part III surveys “Robinson Crusoe over Three Hundred Years.”

After a short, unsigned Preface (but presumably by the editor) and a Chronology, the collection begins with J. Paul Hunter’s thought-provoking “Genre, Nature, Robinson Crusoe,” in which he “use[s] Defoe to point to some textual practices that cross habitual lines and think across received historical categories.” He goes on to list ten of these “textual traditions” before focussing on two: daily journals and Providence books. Interestingly, while acknowledging the strides that have been made in Defoe studies over recent years, Professor Hunter prefaces his remarks on these pre-existing “definable textual traditions” by confessing to two worries: first, about “using the troubled word ‘genre’ itself”; and second, about the teleological tendency which has developed over recent years to see Defoe as first and foremost a novelist. I am sure that the author of Before Novels is right to remind us that Defoe was an “explorer of narrative forms and methods.” I have independently argued that the challenge to readers’ horizons of expectation posed by Robinson Crusoe is often underestimated. No such compunction about teleology characterises Rivka Swenson’s “Robinson Crusoe and the Form of the new Novel,” in which she insists that the book “is a carefully crafted, formally self-aware narrative that the protagonist explicitly labors to fashion from life’s messy incidents and accidents.” Of course, it’s perfectly possible to interpret Crusoe’s errors and contradictions as “signal evidence” of Defoe’s conscious artistry—an attempt to write “splendid metafiction (a fiction about fiction, in this case a fiction about making and conveying fiction)”—and Professor Swenson writes persuasively about the narrative effect of the multifarious “seeming-errors” and “self-contradictions”—but I remain to be convinced that the majority of them are the consequence of anything other than sloppiness or forgetfulness on Defoe’s part. In this instance, I suggest, it is the ingenious critic who is doing the fiction-writing. There is, however, much to admire in Professor Swenson’s consideration of Defoe’s artistry in Robinson Crusoe, and it is the nearest we get in the collection to detailed literary criticism of the text. She is right to tease out the implications of Defoe’s description of the naked, sleeping Friday, “(a detail often missed),” observing that it treats the reader “to a kind of racist buffet consisting of black hair, tawny skin, white teeth.” As she points out, Coleridge’s famous remark that Crusoe is “the universal representative, the person, for whom every reader could substitute himself” really only applies if one is “English, Protestant, white, male, able-bodied, literate.” At the end of a succinct survey of Defoe’s lengthy writing career undertaken with the evident objective of suggesting that Crusoe “might be viewed as the inevitable result of his interests as a writer,” Maximillian E. Novak also comments on the consciousness of Defoe’s artistry to insist on “his achievements—both intellectual and writerly—during the period preceding the publication of his masterpiece.” In “Robinson Crusoe: Good Housekeeping, Gentility, and Property,” Pat Rogers returns to the theme of Crusoe as homo economicus, as well as revisiting Michael Shinagel’s notion of Defoe and “middle-class gentility.” He is absolutely right to maintain that when Defoe makes Crusoe refer to “the middle State, or what might be called the upper Station of Low Life,” this does not equate to “the middle class” as we mean it today. In one of the best essays in the collection, G. A Starr considers Robinson Crusoe in relation to its sequels. His treatment of The Farther Adventures emphasises the importance of viewing the continuation as “a legitimate and worthy sequel,” and convincingly compares a number of its narrative concerns with Defoe’s other “so-called novels,” Captain Singleton and Colonel Jack. In all three, for instance, “the hero-narrator tends to be a reluctant or resistant spectator of violence rather than an initiator or supporter of it.” Professor Starr also identifies deliberative rhetoric as one of the distinctive characteristics of Defoe’s fiction, maintaining that the “productive tension” between storytelling and persuasion, which he argues is present throughout his writings of the 1720s, is seen in Serious Reflections in “undiluted form.” In the final essay in Part I, Rebecca Bullard argues that Robinson Crusoe engages the political philosophy of Filmer, Hobbes, and Locke.

It is not only the consideration of space which leads me to comment more briefly on the other essays. As the titles of Part II and Part III indicate, many of them consider Crusoe in relation to other texts. Thus after explaining the origins of the genre in “Innovation and Imitation in the Robinsonade,” Carl Fisher, without noticeably breaking new ground, considers representative examples of Anglo-American, French and German adaptations before concluding with five paragraphs on “Crusoe’s continuing afterlife.” Similarly, Helen Thompson’s treatment of philosophical and psychological implications of “The Crusoe Story” examines “Crusoe’s recombination of inductive and deductive forms of knowledge” in the context of treatises of the previous century such as Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning and An Essay concerning Humane Understanding. In “Robinson Crusoe and Travel Writing: The Transatlantic World,” on the other hand, Eve Tavor Bannet examines the relationship between Defoe’s narrative and eighteenth-century abridgments, beginning with the two earliest epitomes published in 1719 and 1722, respectively, to put forward the interesting argument that they “succeeded in turning Defoe’s narrative into a travel story full of information about the Atlantic world and the peoples in it,” by curtailing the long island section “to expand on Robinson’s encounters with, and survival of, the dangers presented by the larger Atlantic world.” This turns on its head Pat Rogers’s earlier observation in his 1982 “Classics and Chapbooks” essay (not cited) that it’s the shipwreck and the early part of Crusoe’s life of the island “that is never sacrificed, however abbreviated the text.” The final essay in Part II, Dennis Todd’s “Robinson Crusoe and Colonialism,” correctly notes that, despite what earlier commentators have argued, Defoe’s narrative fails to offer “a straightforward and unalloyed defense of his country’s colonial ventures.” He is right to point out that Defoe does not address commerce and trade in Robinson Crusoe itself, but that is patently not the case in The Farther Adventures which, as is the case with Professor Starr’s essay, once again raises the question whether interpretations of The Strange Surprizing Adventures should also take the sequel into account. After all, Crusoe revisits his island in The Farther Adventures before embarking on a lucrative trading voyage to China with the merchant he encounters in Bengal.

Part III opens with the late David Blewett’s valedictory essay on the subject he made his own, illustrations of Robinson Crusoe. Given his persuasive argument that the “compelling power of Clark and Pine’s drawing owes much to the fact that we see Crusoe, not in real time but rather as a timeless figure—the castaway,” I cannot help but wonder whether the ship in the frontispiece engraving is not meant to represent the shipwreck rather than, as Professor Blewett argues, the ship which finally delivers Crusoe from the island. Jill Campbell suggests that “the greatest ongoing impact” of Defoe’s “most famous novel” has been in the form of literature for children and young adults before proceeding to consider Robinsonades “aimed at a young readership, from the late eighteenth century to the present,” beginning with Campe’s Robinson Der Jüngere (1779-80) and Wyss’s Der Schweizerische Robinson (1812), through Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1858) to Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) and O’Dell’s The Island of the Blue Dophins (1960), which introduced “one of the few girl-characters in [this] literary lineage.” In “Anti-Crusoes, Alternative Crusoes: Revisions of the Island Story in the Twentieth Century,” Anne Marie Fallon also pushes off from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Robinsonades before listing numerous examples from the second half of the twentieth century in which “alternative and antagonistic Robinson Crusoe, and a few Fridays, abound.” Selection is clearly an issue here. It is not surprising that Coetzee’s Foe puts in an appearance but, perhaps understandably given the brief, a lot of her treatment of the novel is in the form of plot summary—a formula which is repeated in the discussions of Sam Selvon’s Moses Ascending (1975), Julieta Campos’s The Fear of Losing Eurydice (1979), and Jane Gardam’s Crusoe’s Daughter (1985). Similar issues present themselves in the concluding essay, Robert Mayer’s “Robinson Crusoe in the Screen Age,” which offers a useful survey of screen versions of Defoe’s tale from the earliest silent films to the twenty-first century, but returns time and again to Crusoe on Mars (1964) and the classic serialized version by Jean Sacha broadcast by the BBC in the 1960s.

Taken together, the essays in Part III, and some those in Part II, bring into play the implications of the observation with which I began this review: in what sense is this a “companion” to Robinson Crusoe; and what is the target audience? The blurb concludes by claiming that “By considering Defoe’s seminal work from a variety of critical perspectives this book provides a full understanding of the perennial fascination with, and the enduring legacy of, both the book and its iconic hero.” I’m not sure it does. I’m particularly concerned by the phrase, “a variety of critical perspectives,” because the reader is sold short on what I would regard as literary criticism of the text of Robinson Crusoe. What we are offered instead is a variety of contextual perspectives from the moment of the original publication of Defoe’s narrative right through to the twenty-first century. But that is not the same thing.

J. A. Downie

Goldsmiths, University of London

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Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature, by Jason Farr

Kathleen Lubey

What is fiction in the Georgian era to do with deformity, impairment, corpulence, injury—with bodies that don’t promise normative reproductive futures? Jason Farr finds that eighteenth-century authors were less perplexed by this question than we might think. Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature shows that disabled figures advanced live, open-ended debates about education, moral reform, degeneracy, gender, and sexuality. Farr’s purpose is to center such characters and show us varied conversations at work about how their bodies signify alternate social and sexual formations to normative structures. “Variably-embodied people” stand outside the boundaries of institutions that would privatize the body, and they display physical and epistemological differences that resist assimilation to conventional Enlightenment subjectivity. Written with enviable clarity and purpose, Novel Bodies makes central and transformative the pervasive presence of disabled figures in the literary and social spheres of Georgian Britain, as well as the queer, reformist attention they elicit. I left the book newly attuned to how differently-abled characters—a capacious category including injured soldiers, impoverished servants, nonhearing prophets, transgender people, enslaved laborers, and women of learning—sustain, across eighteenth-century fiction, a conversation about the capacity of a society to care for all its members, even to reinvent social categories the better to recognize and accommodate variable forms of subjectivity and desire.

I will praise many aspects of Novel Bodies in this review, but I want to begin with Farr’s innovation of the critical terrain for eighteenth-century studies. His capacious definition of disability, referring broadly to variably-embodied people and those who are perceived as such, includes a vast range of figures, and this range calls for theories of identity and political subjectivity that exceed those of our period. Disability, capacious and diverse, does not draw hard edges, but links to practices of inequity we’ve long found problematic in the Enlightenment: enslavement, gender, heteronormativity, social hierarchy, the privatization of property. These worldly factors, Farr shows, contribute to the variegation of bodies. Rather than explain these convergences within an insulated context of eighteenth-century studies (and even as he draws judiciously on its great resources), Farr energizes critical conversations between our field and feminism, queer theory, disability studies, and critical race theory. The introduction merges the specificity of eighteenth-century variable embodiment with critical rooting in scholarship by Kimberlé Crenshaw, Alison Kafer, and Robert McRuer to demonstrate how disability is understood as a politicized aspect of identity with queer affiliations; later in the book Sara Ahmed helps to explain queer object choice. What Farr wants to show us about eighteenth-century disability’s queerness—that it “indicate[s] a change of direction for British society”—cannot be explained fully by our field and its historicism. Farr provides an exemplary model of how eighteenth-century studies, and particularly work on non-normative identities and disenfranchised groups, can be fruitfully indebted to scholarship advancing social justice in contemporary contexts. Delivering on its promise “to crip the literature of the Georgian period,” Novel Bodies scaffolds a critical framework that models, I hope, future directions for our field. Farr’s prose also models how to write with transparency and care about disability in historical contexts. Writing this review, I realized how regularly I turn to ableist verbs and metaphors to describe literary response, a default I’ll now work to correct.

Farr joins this fresh critical environment to a literary landscape that is familiar without being overdetermined, placing some greatest hits (Pamela, Belinda) alongside lesser-studied fiction (Sarah Scott’s novels, the Duncan Campbell narratives), drawing on educational and medical writing along the way. A smart introduction confronts the Enlightenment-era equation of impairment with “non-subjecthood,” where unsoundness of body is equated with an incapacity for freedom. Novels contest this social hierarchy by “writ[ing] disabled people into subjectivity,” and Walpole’s Castle of Otranto exemplifies their resistance to the “narrow demands of primogeniture” and the normative masculinity it promulgates. Chapter One explores auditory impairment as a flexible form in narratives about deaf seer Duncan Campbell, where his nonhearing generates group practices of empirical perception, uniting bodies in queer communities. Chapter Two situates corporeality within labor, class, and moral fiction. Where Richardson ultimately excludes Mrs. Jewkes’s “deformity” from his plot, Scott creates a “body-oriented feminism” that seeks inclusive reform, even as it concedes that class and labor limit the degree to which variably-embodied people thrive. Disability and medicine overlap in Chapter Three. Smollett’s picaresque Humphrey Clinker surveys a “wide spectrum of embodiment” in its discourse on health, recognizing the possibility of non-reproductive futurity within an overarching alignment of health, marriage, and pastoral retreat. Chapter Four locates in Burney’s Camilla and Edgeworth’s Belinda highly visible expressions of unconventional gender that “undermin[e] binary thinking” and expose the limitations of the nuclear family. A brief coda clarifies the breadth of eighteenth-century disability’s queer affiliations. The “joint appearance” of queerness and disability “often signals an authorial impulse to write social reform into narrative,” a project that exceeds full narrative containment in any given work. By book’s end, I agreed entirely with Farr on “how absolutely interconnected disability and sexuality are” in our period.

As Novel Bodies demonstrates across sensational, domestic, picaresque, and Revolutionary-era fictions, authors are never able to integrate entirely—which is to say they are not able to erase or resolve—the social possibilities raised by variably-embodied people, leading authors to imagine queer desires within and around them. The convergence of disability and sexuality is foundational and dialectical: both discourses assess bodies quizzically, invasively, and unwaveringly, attempting to account for non-normative (which is to say, non-heteromasculine) sensation, experience, knowledge, and pleasure. Women, gender non-conformers, people with variable physicality, behaviors, and senses—all embody alterity, and therefore attract and evade regulation, prompting authors to create narrative space and social alternatives. If I found some local instances of Farr’s readings overly optimistic about texts’ engagement with reform (as I did with Scott and Smollett), it’s because he has committed so fully to exploring disability’s impact on the futures imagined by novels. He has begun an incisive, transformative conversation about the impact of variable embodiment on novels’ invention of new social roles and institutions.

Much more often than skepticism, I felt surprise and appreciation for the porous boundaries Farr illuminates between disability and other forms of eighteenth-century alterity, such as transgressive sexuality, race, and gender. Farr devises an inclusive methodology for identifying variable embodiment, and I’d like to demonstrate its impact by providing examples of how I saw disability converging upon these companion discourses. First, in Chapter Two, Farr documents Mrs. Jewkes’ sexual transgression—her queer desire—as part of the corruption that impinges on Pamela’s project of moral reform. Her gritty viscerality—rendered in unusual detail, as Farr recognizes, for an author focused on characters’ minds and morals—shades into the language of impairment and corporeal contagion, posing an insistent sexual threat to Pamela. This threat is resolved into disembodied moral subjectivity later in the novel, under Mr. B’s reformed influence. This expulsion of embodied corruption clarifies, I find, materiality elsewhere in Richardson’s oeuvre, such as Mrs. Sinclair’s deathbed morbidity in Clarissa. In a novel famously attuned to ethics and interiors, the bawd’s “huge tongue hideously rolling” and “bellows-shaped and variously-coloured breasts ascending by turns to her chin” stand out as grotesquerie, but in the context of Farr’s analysis, I perceive this unruly bodily material as Richardson’s ground zero of the corrupt, voracious, and infectious subculture that hosts the heroine’s assault.[1] Richardsonian corporeality—a rarity—is newly understood as a locus of transgression (here, sexual commerce) that must be disciplined.

Second, Farr demonstrates the connectivity of disability with debates on the slave trade. Farr finds in Scott’s Sir George Ellison an ameliorative discourse that refuses to recognize Black injury, imagining enslaved people as “free of physical impairment” despite their inhumane treatment (96). This insight prompted my thinking in two directions regarding literatures of enslavement. His reading, on the one hand, signals the importance of Marisa Fuentes’s work on the “mutilated historicity” legible on the bodies of enslaved people.[2] It also throws into relief the eighteenth-century awareness more broadly that enslaved people would inevitably incur injury. Exactly contemporary with Ellison, James Grainger’s apologist poem The Sugar-Cane robustly acknowledges ailment and impairment in enslaved populations, meticulously outlining a plan to maintain their health and, therefore, their productivity. Implicit in these instructions is Grainger’s awareness of widespread injury caused by the Middle Passage, slave markets, plantation labor, and torture. Grainger writes for the purposes of labor management, of course, but, adjoined to Scott’s deletion of harm, we can recognize that slavery’s debaters understood the immediacy and ubiquity of bodily impairment, but deployed or suppressed that understanding to instrumental rather than reparative ends.

Third, and most central to Farr’s project, disability’s foregrounding of the body is central, I am convinced, to any consideration of gender in the period. Experiences or attributes that make bodies visible (like Eugenia Tyrold’s smallpox “disfigurements” in turn impact how people live (unbeautiful, Eugenia spends her adolescence with books, indifferent to courtship rituals). Such combination of experience and embodiment makes her a peculiar subject, in some measure unfit for the standard practices of the eighteenth-century marriage market. Such pointed display of variable embodiment and its social vectors also manifests in the “public transgender subjectivity” of Belinda’s Harriet Freke. Harriet’s bonds with Lady Delacour manifest in a “visible queer eroticism” that affiliates the markers of their variable bodies (Harriet’s men’s clothing, Lady Delacour’s injured breast). Historians of gender and sexuality are still working out how and whether to attribute transgender to historical subjects.[3] Farr makes a persuasive case for the usefulness of the anachronism, counting transgender subjectivity alongside anti-domestic femininity and women’s learning as instances of gender’s functioning as disability—as, that is, standing staunchly outside and against the normative contours that facilitate assimilation to heteronormativity.

Farr centers his book on disability and sexuality, but his analysis demonstrates again and again the impossibility of cutting these categories off from a broad social arena that hierarchizes people and identities. Farr understands, as eighteenth-century authors did, that the literary was one realm for experimenting with alternate futures. Histories of gender and private life—by Lawrence Stone and Anthony Fletcher, for instance—have elided variably embodied subjects in their depictions of normative domesticity. Farr shows such sanctified realms to be under constant disturbance by figures who do not, will not, cannot conform, and whose resistance signals alternate realities to the ones novels try to sustain.

Kathleen Lubey

St. John’s University

1. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady, ed. Angus Ross (Penguin, 1985), 1388.

2. Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (U of Pennsylvania P, 2016), 16.

3. For contrasting approaches to this question, see Jen Manion, Female Husbands: A Trans History (Cambridge UP, 2020) and Sal Nicolazzo, “Henry Fielding’s Female Husband and the Sexuality of Vagrancy” in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 55.4 (2014): 335-353.

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Empiricist Devotions: Science Religion, and Poetry in Early Eighteenth-Century England, by Courtney Weiss Smith

Laura Miller

The discipline of eighteenth-century studies has seen exciting recent publications focusing on the intersections of science and literature. What has been done less frequently has been to relate science and literature by way of poetry. Courtney Weiss Smith’s Empiricist Devotions: Science, Religion, and Poetry in Early Eighteenth-Century England uses the genre of poetry to evaluate the intersections of religion and the New Science in eighteenth-century literature and culture. Smith’s masterful readings and deep exploration of religion, science, and poetics make this book a powerful addition to eighteenth-century science studies.

Smith’s first chapter, “Occasional Meditation, an Empirical-Devotional Mode,” explores the occasional meditation, an empiricist mode that revealed how writers’ understanding of the natural world and theology could work in internal conversation. In contrast to a formal, lengthy meditation such as Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), an occasional meditation was more extemporaneous and more suited to analysis of particular circumstances. Analogy, Smith shows, was central to both devotional writing and empiricist writing, as she addresses the similar writing style in Robert Boyle’s science and his theology. These writings were linked and were meant to be seen as compatible. Occasional meditations helped writers learn how to write about nature and understand it. These texts compose a current that connected Boyle to early eighteenth-century writers who followed his lead; Boyle’s work helped to structure the way these writers thought—and how they thought about writing. Smith argues persuasively that Boyle’s meditations and Hooke’s experiments have literary merit and deserve more attention in eighteenth-century scholarship beyond science studies.

After this foundational chapter, Smith focuses more exclusively on imaginative literature and its relation to these occasional meditations. Her second chapter, “Deus in Machina: Popular Newtonianism’s Visions of the Clockwork World,” addresses depictions of a Newtonian worldview in poetry and prose. It has long been established that the Newtonian universe had a religious component, whether in the General Scholium to the Principia or in lectures by William Whiston and others about religion’s place in a worldview that reframes nature, time, and space. Smith links popular poetry about science to other popular works like the Boyle lectures, analyzing the way these texts synthesized a dominant metaphor of the universe as a clockwork mechanism. Coupled with the newly dominant understanding of universal gravitation as a divine phenomenon, the clockwork universe was updated to include the New Science.

Smith then builds outward to consider how a “meditative empiricism” helped writers contemplate changes in economic theory during the eighteenth century. In Chapter Three, “Money, Meaning, and a ‘Foundation in Nature,’” Smith reveals the links between religion, science, and economics in eighteenth-century poetry. This exceptionally innovative chapter calls into question dominant Whiggish narratives of eighteenth-century economics. Far from being a narrative of modernization and a move away from nature, Smith shows how economic writers sought answers in, and adjacent to, natural philosophy. The chapter describes another topic adjacent to popular Newtonianism—the British recoinage crisis of the 1690s when Newton was Warden of the Mint. Smith contextualizes this debate as one of order and nature as well as one of economy, showing that these elements were inseparable from one another. Money was not just an abstract concept in the 1690s, but a scientific and philosophical one, with the need for both literally and metaphorically weighted support. The economy, too, is embedded in natural philosophy and its divine designs, and its theorists, across political lines, used meditative empiricism to engage with the natural world as they sought economic solutions. These narratives are then juxtaposed with it-narratives of coins, in which symbols of economy are brought into constant contact with representatives of the natural world.

The fourth chapter, “Empiricist Subjects, Providential Nature, and Social Contracts,” synthesizes politics, empiricism, and divinity. Scholars have long described the political qualities of empiricist science, especially when there was so much overlap between scientific practitioners and public political figures. Smith’s analysis of empiricist political subjects opens up this conversation to include her convincing integration of empiricism and the social contract.  As in her previous chapter, this chapter excels in breaking down political divides by looking at the commonalities fostered by occasional meditations. Pairings of Pope and Bolingbroke, as well as Defoe and Locke, look closely at different ways writers responded to the contrast between theories of institutions and theories of nature. In the instance of Defoe, Smith examines Jure Divino alongside Locke’s Two Treatises to show how Jure Divino is not just a discussion of divine law, but of how humans use their divine capabilities to help build and construct societies, wherein human reason must be coded as divine in origin, but human and divine knowledge exist in balance. This discussion has clear parallels to natural philosophical writings. Sometimes “science studies” can seem like a standalone part of eighteenth-century studies, but Smith’s excellent work on Defoe’s poetry and Locke here, as well as her cogent analysis of Pope’s Essay on Man, further demonstrate the relevance of the book to its wider field.

The last chapter of Empiricist Devotions returns to “Empirical-Devotional” material through “Georgic Realism, an Empirical-Devotional Poetics.” No discussion of natural philosophy and poetry in the long eighteenth century would be complete without attention to the Georgic, and Smith moves apart from obvious Georgic targets to center the significance of early eighteenth-century works such as John Gay’s Rural Sports and John Philips’s Cyder. Smith persuades readers that early eighteenth-century Georgic represented a departure from a bifurcated seventeenth-century model, and that, as with the other writings she examines in this book, early eighteenth-century Georgic was its own form of empiricist devotional. The Georgic’s integration of rural life with the New Science was not secondary to other rhetorical strategies but was part of its fundamental aims. Her reading of Gay’s work, in particular, uses discussions of particularity often used to write about novels as a means of remapping realist analysis onto a poetic subject. Smith’s chapter shows how important it is to not let theoretical models in which “the prose of the New Science” and “the Rise of the Novel” become a dyad when other early eighteenth-century writers used scientific particularity to reinvigorate poetic representation. For more essential work in this mode, read Smith’s excellent edited collection Eighteenth-Century Poetry and The Rise of the Novel Reconsidered (ed. with Kate Parker, Bucknell UP, 2013).

Empiricist Devotions is masterfully written in its style and clarity of expression. Smith has engaged in thorough, rigorous research while engaging with the history of relevant scholarship in multiple fields. What is especially helpful is her ability to place in dialogue discourses of theology, imaginative literature, and empiricism. Scholars of Defoe will especially benefit from Smith’s examination of his verse and social contract theory, as well as the broader investment in the currents of religious dissent and economics that shaped Defoe’s career. A small criticism would be that the scope and subject of the book mean that women thinkers and writers do not have substantial presence in it; more attention to either masculinity as an underexplored natural philosophical component or more work with the incongruity of women writers next to Smith’s argument might resonate with readers, although Empiricist Devotions cites women scholars and critics whenever possible. Notwithstanding this suggestion, I enthusiastically recommend Smith’s far-ranging and welcome contribution to eighteenth-century studies.

University of West Georgia

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