These two books will permanently change our conception of Queen Anne and, incidentally, the decade of her reign. The adjectives most used to describe and characterize Queen Anne have been “fat,” “sluggish,” “dull,” and “preferring women.” In fact, she was, in James A. Winn’s words, “a popular and successful monarch” under whose reign England became a major power, a monarch who established England as a Protestant nation. The aim of these books is to demonstrate that she was a formidable, discerning patron, consumer, and performer of the arts while bolstering the case for her skill in governing. The books are somewhat related. With knowledge that Winn’s Queen Anne was nearing completion, Anna Battigelli and Cedric Reverand gathered other scholars for a stellar panel at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (2012) that grew into the collection of essays, Queen Anne and the Arts, edited by Reverand with a wide-ranging lead-off essay by Winn that concludes that “her practice and appreciation of the arts…helped give Queen Anne the moral and intellectual vitality that sustained her throughout her remarkable reign” (38).

There is unusual variety and energy in the essays. Sharing Winn’s distaste, bordering on contempt, for King William, Reverand starts the book off with this observation: “The main original contributions to English culture under Dutch William were a craze for tulips; a fashion for collecting blue-and-white china, including, especially, china tulip holders (‘tulipiere:’); and a passion for a popular Dutch beverage, gin” (2). Some of the liveliness of the collection comes from the unrivalled expertise of some of the contributors. Barbara Benedict, for instance, knows more about collectors and collecting than any other scholar, and her learned “The Moral in the Material: Numismatics and Identity in Evelyn, Addison, and Pope” takes us on a tour of this culturally telling “national passion” that does not seem to include tulipiere.

A theme in the collection is the opinion that 1702-1714 has also been considered one of the most uncreative periods in English history. Abigail Williams asks, “What was everyone reading while waiting for Pope, Gay, Swift, or Wortley Montagu?” (119). Working with miscellanies as varied as Edward Bysshe’s Art of English Poetry and Poems on Affairs of State and Tonson’s prestigious Poetical Miscellanies, she demonstrates the eclectic taste of readers of that time and the lasting influence of this first major gathering of post-Restoration poetry. Many of the essays suggest that it was a decade of gathering, assessing, and perhaps launching. Although I do not agree with Brian Corman that George Farquhar has been neglected, his compilations of new comedies and close work with the grouping that Shirley Kenny described as “humane” comedy are exceptionally valuable and a model of how to analyze the repertory of a distinct period. Now as eighteenth-century drama specialists have added major attention to Cibber, Centlivre, and Steele, he shows us that this generation of playwrights had come to understand “the [English] rules and principles of comedy” (157). Cumulatively, lists of artistic, literary, musical, and architectural achievements scattered through these two books indisputably refute the idea that it was a fallow decade.

Winn’s biography breaks from conventional biographical practice, even from the form of “thematic” biography. Although historical and biographical events and landmarks trace Anne’s life, the reading experience is more like immersion in the Culture of her life (I am using the common distinction between Culture, culture and Kultur), and some of the interpretations of Anne’s feelings strike me as more speculative than is common in biographies not openly willing to use “versioning” as a methodology. Each chapter of the biography begins with a culture-rich event. In the first place, this strategy makes the book a delightful read. For all its scholarly depth and sophistication, it is smooth and accessible. Second, the chapter beginnings are an arresting and sober portrait of Anne’s life as one marked by funerals. Even those that begin with a birthday celebration are heavily tinted by grim politics (who will not come or acknowledge it) or what we know is coming (an impending death). The first chapter is built around the performance of John Crowne’s Calisto by the princesses Anne and Mary and a collection of court women and girls (Charles’s illegitimate progeny and at least one mistress, plus some 90 professionals). Winn uses this event masterfully to demonstrate the inappropriate and sexually charged culture in which the young Anne lived and also her training, enjoyment, and skill in dancing, playing musical instruments, acting, and judging art. This firm foundation serves throughout the book.

Perhaps the most unexpected, but also masterful, is chapter 9, which begins with the 1710 trial of the Reverend Henry Sacheverell. Winn begins by telling us that no less than Christopher Wren was employed to construct additional seating to enable 2000 people to get tickets to watch in Westminster Hall, somewhat ironically the location of coronations. Sacheverell actually turned it into a coronation with triumphant royal progress at the conclusion. It is appropriate in this architecturally structured book that the final chapter, with its perfect title, “All a Nation Could Require,” begins with Anne’s funeral, with rich accounts of scenes, poetry, children’s choirs, and processions, and concludes with her final action, taking the White Staff away from Oxford.

If Winn’s Anne is deeply cultured and finding great pleasure throughout her life in theatrical performances, excellent au courant poetry, and fine music, she is also a poignant figure. Treated badly, even insultingly, before she became queen, her formerly athletic and graceful body distorted and racked by pregnancies, unable to reward or even keep her beloved friends around her even when queen, she endured a long, increasingly expensive war and the splintering of her country into two violent political parties. Her religious practices were sustaining and pleasurable for her, yet religion was the major source of conflict. People clung to their opinions and their resentments. Her declarations of support for the Church of England delighted and terrified her subjects. The Sacheverell trial nearly tore the nation apart, and in the essay collection, Williams points out that there were four volumes of poems commenting on the trial (some reprinted for years).

Perhaps it is a measure of Defoe’s own importance—or notoriety—in his own time that both books discuss, at least briefly, his relationship with the queen. During her reign, he was one of the most persistent and annoying men to engage her on the subject of religion. He had an unusual amount of contact with Queen Anne. He exasperated her when she joined the Privy Council in interrogating him in 1703, and she pardoned him twice, once in 1704 and again in 1713. Upon his arrest in May 1703 for seditious libel for publishing The Shortest Way with Dissenters, he was taken immediately to Daniel Finch, Earl of Nottingham. Defoe had been declared an outlaw and had been a fugitive for four months and now would be confined in Newgate Prison. He was suspected of being part of the group formed at the end of William’s reign that had influenced dissolving the parliament and was now allied with “a set” of powerful Whigs who opposed the growth of a High Church party. Even after he was tried and sentenced to the pillory, efforts to extract information continued. The Queen had been apprised about Defoe’s case on a nearly day-by-day basis, and on 21 July he was taken to Windsor where Queen Anne joined the Privy Council in questioning him. He exasperated the Queen, and, according to Nottingham, she was ready to have “Mr. Fooe” stand in the pillory immediately.

Winn and Nicholas Seager in his essay, “‘She will not be that tyrant they desire’: Daniel Defoe and Queen Anne,” realize the significance of The Shortest Way with Dissenters in setting the tone for Anne’s infant reign. Taken together and read closely, Winn’s and Seager’s narratives reveal a change that, sadly, occurred in Anne’s reign. We know far less about her first two years as queen than we do about the middle and last years of her reign, and Winn offers some useful additional information. He makes clear how quickly Anne tried to reward those who had been loyal and, especially, kind to her during her years as a snubbed princess. One of those people was Nottingham, about whom we usually hear negative descriptions or nothing. Winn points out that he was one of the secretaries of state from 1689 to 1693 and that he occasionally “sneered” at Queen Mary, who thought him “not true to the government” (161-62, 172). Anne was godmother to Nottingham’s son in 1691. In 1703, he was a leading opponent of occasional conformity and wanted Defoe prosecuted. That he could persuade Anne to interrogate (and terrify Defoe) when she was still a new queen gives a glimpse of the active, energetic woman Anne had been and the good, trusting relationship she then had with her Privy Council. Seager’s essay takes up the narrative of Anne and her Privy Council, for he concentrates on the years near the end of her reign when partisan fury, conniving, and elaborate schemes reached an unprecedented height. Anne’s struggle to manage her Privy Council and wrest power away from those she believed wrong-headed and detrimental are in sharp contrast to the relationships of 1703.

Seager argues that Defoe’s strategy for influencing Anne (and shaping opinions about her and her government) was to portray her as “a nonpartisan queen” and the willing guarantor of the Protestant Succession and the Toleration Act (43). He insisted that she had given “Her Royal Word” to support toleration. With such characterizations, he hoped to make it difficult for her to do otherwise, and as Seager argues, he begins to instruct the Queen in how to govern, specifically recommending that she take more explicit stands against both the Jacobite threat and religious extremism. This urgency began with the Sacheverell events and escalated as Anne’s health became alarmingly bad. Defoe portrayed the Queen as committed to her pledge and the terms of the Union that included the Act of Settlement. Seager does admirable close readings in the morass of Defoe’s publications, even making a case that Defoe did write Memoirs of the Conduct of her Majesty, a propaganda piece I have never been convinced was his. Seager could have strengthened his case by reminding us that Defoe had a life-long history of instructing his monarchs, even drawing on the ancient genre advices to the king. When he died, with King George in mind, he was writing “Of Royall Education,” a survey of the education and behavior of English kings.

Winn and the essayists are so knowledgeable that they can create deep, even detailed, immersion and collectively produce a revisionary view of Anne and her time—and Defoe’s time. For the serious Defoe scholar, these books are poignant reminders of the world Defoe did not live in. He walked by Wren churches, saw and read about ceremonial processions, and even had a portrait of himself done by Jeremiah Taverner (not mentioned in either of these books). Opera, opening night at the Royal Theatre with Anne present—no, instead there is the solitary figure dressed in a slouch hat and jocky-cut, wool coat riding in the rain around England in 1705 and a few years later on the long road to Edinburgh in what he believed to be important government service. These books are also reminders of how Queen Anne lived in Defoe’s world, caught up in the same swirling, threatening political maelstrom, and she, like his contemporaries, could not ignore his flamboyant efforts to interpret and shape opinion with titles such as And What If the Pretender Should Come? (1713).

Paula R. Backscheider
Auburn University

For anyone interested in Defoe, or in British fiction and politics between the 1603 Union of the Crowns and the Great Reform Act of 1832, this book is full of stimulating ideas. In some ways it delivers more than its title suggests, because it deals not just with Scottish writing but also with work by Defoe and Francis Bacon. Though it concludes elegantly, it is marred, especially in its early pages, by stylistic awkwardness. Nevertheless, readers willing to put up with some of Swenson’s quirks of style will find that the rewards of the book far outweigh its demerits.

At the core of Essential Scots is an argument that a sense of resolute Scottish identity underpins or at least persists in prose texts that deal with Scotland or Scottish characters even as the political union between Scotland and England gathers pace. Though Swenson’s title uses the word “literature,” in practice she has very little to say about poetry and nothing at all to say about drama. So she considers in some detail Francis Bacon’s consideration of the politics of Union, but ignores Shakespeare’s treatment of Scotland in Macbeth and most of the poetry of Robert Burns. For Swenson, Bacon at the start of the seventeenth century and Defoe around the start of the eighteenth are “authors of unionism” who knew and furthered a narrative culture that had at its heart “the trope of e/migratory Scottishness” (27). Drawing on the work of the historian David Dobson and others, Swenson relates actual Scottish emigration to literary and cultural imaginings of it, beginning with the move southwards of King James VI of Scotland in 1603. Though it ignores the Latin culture important in the era of James VI, Swenson’s research is thoroughly grounded in readings of Anglophone political pamphlets, related non-fiction, and contemporary iconography: repeatedly in fiction and in non-fictional prose, we encounter the Scots as travellers leaving Scotland, sometimes to return and sometimes not, but discovering in themselves a residue of Scottish identity that persists below or beside an assumed Britishness. To some audiences, this persisting Scottishness is a reassurance, but to others it can appear a menace. Not the least of this book’s pleasures is its reproduction of a number of a number of drawings and cartoons; in one of these, Richard Newton’s 1796 “A Flight of Scotchmen,” an airborne swarm of kilted Scots with bagpipes is shown descending on the rooftops of London like a Caledonian aerial bombardment.

Swenson shows how thoroughly Defoe was engaged in the debates around the Union of Parliaments in 1707. While she acknowledges that his writings were often intended to act as unionist propaganda, she sees them as rather more complicated than that and detects in them also concerns about the instability of the emergent British union. In the Scottish section of Defoe’s Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, Swenson demonstrates convincingly how “the diction, the grammar, conveys the threat of a ‘traveling’ Scottish essence” that has the power to disrupt any smooth narrative of British union (64). Provocatively, she argues also that it was Defoe’s engagement with debates about union within the island of Britain which helped condition the narrative structure of his fictions about that islander Robinson Crusoe. In her view, “the Union, and unionism, is the source for the Crusoe story, formally as well as substantively” (52). So, for instance, Swenson sees the first half of Crusoe’s Further Adventures as “an allegory of unionist fantasy. Crusoe jubilates over bringing the island, the story, into the pale of his ‘narrow compass’” (57). However, just as for the Defoe who writes about British political union, doubts concerning the creation of a stable political “whole” emerge in written narrative, so in Crusoe’s Farther Adventures “the dream does not last,” and the text comes to “encode the failures rather than the successes of Anglo-British incorporation.’” Swenson’s subtle interrogation of Defoe’s texts and her relating Defoe’s writings on unionism and “the whole island” of Britain to Crusoe’s endeavours on his rather different island are not the least impressive aspect of her book.

This examination of Defoe prefigures persuasive readings of Smollett’s Roderick Random and Humphry Clinker. The former is seen as deploying a version of “what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls ‘strategic essentialism’” as the hero Roderick, an emigrant Scot in England, discovers “a submerged essential identity that connects him to other Scots” (81). Humphry Clinker is read as “primarily…a Scots-Welsh novel that imagines an alternative union-within-Union” (116). This is an astute reading and sits well alongside Smollett’s interest in ancient British identities, but it may play down too much the importance of England in Humphry Clinker. Similarly, Swenson’s reading of Samuel Johnson’s Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland is very shrewd when it comes to identifying Johnson’s stress on Scotland’s actual (as distinct from poeticized, Ossianic) ruins, but she fails to articulate just how hostile Johnson’s repeated stress on Scotland as ruined becomes, especially when one takes into account (as Swenson does not) that Johnson is writing at the height of one of the most glorious periods in Scottish intellectual history—the period that we now term the Scottish Enlightenment. The selectivity of Johnson’s gaze—his ignoring of most of Scotland’s Enlightenment glories and his minimal treatment of her principal intellectual centers (Glasgow and Edinburgh) in favour of a repeated focus on ruins and ruined places such as St Andrews and Elgin—is in line with his spiritedly Scotophobic and anti-Presbyterian remarks elsewhere. Certainly Johnson can be generous to aspects of Scottish culture, such as the Scottish Latinity of George Buchanan and Arthur Johnston (ignored by Swenson), but his selective focus tells its own revealing story. Swenson tends to miss that.

More convincingly perceptive is the treatment of the novels of Susan Ferrier in the fourth chapter of Essential Scots. Alert both to literary theory and to the nuances of language in Ferrier’s work, this chapter shoes how Ferrier’s best known novel, Marriage, “distinguishes itself by endorsing the progressive rehabilitation of a nascently modern, British, national whole and by nurturing the rise of an articulated individuation within it” (147). Yet Swenson shows, too, how the heroine of that novel remains attached to markers of Scottish identity which may have become “clichés” yet which continue to matter. The final chapter of Essential Scots deals with the way in which the bestselling writer Robert Mudie in The Modern Athens and elsewhere chronicled the 1822 visit by King George IV to Edinburgh. This is one of the most original parts of Swenson’s intellectually stimulating book. Several recent writers, most notably Caroline McCracken-Flesher and Ian Duncan, have written about the spectacular excesses of the 1822 extravaganza. It was substantially stage-managed by Walter Scott and was the first visit to Scotland by a British monarch for centuries. No one has written about the visit as a media spectacle as thoroughly or perceptively as Swenson. She does not simply settle for a blow-by-blow account, though she does quote amusing details from the reportage: “peaches, pine-apples…apricots, currants, raspberries, of which the King partook…The water and cream ices produced were most exquisite, and pleased his Majesty very much, as did also some orange chips” (213). Rather than just citing such choice details from Mudie’s account, Swenson draws on previously unpublished illustrations as well as on a range of published sources to demonstrate how all this spectacular unionism collapses under its own weight. Though she does not use the phrase, this is risible unionism. In his effort to turn Scotland’s “locations of belonging—and their symbols—into the subnational enablers of prismatic Britshness [sic],” Mudie produces work which enjoyed for a short time considerable commercial success but which now seems embarrassing and ridiculous (180). His Account, with its “take-home totems” is itself, Swenson argues, “a meta-fetish that both anticipates capitalist realism and instantiates the emergence of consumer nationalism” (215). Swenson is admirably restrained in her description of the sheer daftness of the 1822 events and their reporting, but it is hard for readers to peruse her chapter on Mudie without smirking. Essential Scots concludes with a short but fascinating ‘coda,’ which glances at several texts by Walter Scott, particularly his fine stories “The Two Drovers,” “The Highland Widow,” and “The Surgeon’s Daughter,” hinting that in these can be detected continuing energies which may disrupt attempts at neat political narratives of Britishness.

Mentioned on occasion, and ghosting Swenson’s text throughout, are recent developments in Scottish politics which have led commentators to pay fresh attention to narratives of Scotland, England, and “Britishness” across the centuries. Devolution in the 1990s and the Scottish independence referendum of 2014 (in which 45% of Scottish voters voted for Scotland to become once more an independent country), accompanied by the perhaps unstoppable rise of pro-independence parties in Scottish politics, have operated alongside cultural developments, including works of literary criticism. It is a pity that Swenson does not take all of these into account. Though it is clear from her footnotes that she was working on Essential Scots until the summer of 2015, awkwardly her book makes no mention of Christopher Whatley’s widely reviewed The Scots and the Union (2006; second ed., 2014) nor of Robert Crawford’s Bannockburns: Scottish Independence and Literary Imagination, 1314-2014, which was published in January 2014.

Such omissions are all the more striking because Essential Scots confirms Swenson as an important contributor to modern debates about literature and Scottish, British, and English identity in literature—debates that are as alive today as they were in the era of Daniel Defoe. In her next, book Swenson should abjure all epigraphs and parentheses. Essential Scots is addicted to both. It makes endless clunky references to its own epigraphs; its chapter titles are over-ornate; and there is too much grad-school prose of the sort that helps atrophy the power of the humanities in the wider world:

Likewise, if the developmental individual (and Bildung model for narrativity and identity) Franco Moretti finds in later nineteenth-century literature has little relevance to the eighteenth-century narrative imagination, I show how essential Scottishness in early nineteenth-century Scottish writing both resisted and contributed to the naturalization of a seemingly de-politicized literary unionsism [sic] (a function of ‘national realism’) and to the codification of the developmental individual whose transformation from flat ‘character’ Deirdre Lynch has elegantly illuminated. (12)

Too many sentences like that risk limiting the audience for this book—which is unfortunate because it is repeatedly shrewd and insightful in its readings of canonical and little-read writers from Bacon and Defoe to Ferrier, Mudie, and Scott.

Robert Crawford
University of St Andrews

The focus of James V. Morrison’s Shipwrecked is encapsulated in its subtitle: Disaster and Transformation in Homer, Shakespeare, Defoe, and the Modern World. Drawing upon The Odyssey, The Tempest, and Robinson Crusoe, Morrison identifies a set of recurrent features—a storm, the characters’ ignorance of their location, the possibility of a divine epiphany, the creation of a new civilization—as he pursues his main contention, that “authors of literary shipwrecks are continually exploring the identities and potential new roles of survivors” (4). Despite a few exceptions, the story Morrison tells is largely an optimistic one: shipwrecks are increasingly the condition for salutary transformation, and the closer he comes to the present—the last page presents the author’s own photograph of waves on the Saint Lucia beach—the more sanguine the analysis becomes.

Morrison devotes a chapter to each of his exemplary texts, showing how characters respond to opportunities for personal transformation. In The Odyssey, Morrison finds a story of opportunity rejected: the Nausicaa episode of Book 5 and the Calypso episode of Book 12 each show Odysseus rejecting the temptation to abandon his role as husband and king. Shipwrecks are “obstacles to his ultimate desire to reclaim his identity as Odysseus, king of Ithaca” (32), but they are obstacles that Odysseus triumphantly overcomes as his identity remains constant. The Tempest, for Morrison, is a more multifaceted shipwreck narrative: “it is truly remarkable how many possible ‘reinventions of the self’ are contemplated” (45). The key word here is “contemplated,” for Morrison argues that by the end of the play, few of the potential transformations have actually come to fruition. Though Ferdinand and Miranda are now married, Ariel is a free spirit, and Prospero is the recognized Duke of Milan; neither Sebastian nor Ferdinand has become the king of Naples; Stephano, Trinculo, and Caliban have not killed Prospero and become king and viceroys of the island; and Stephano has not become Miranda’s husband. It is a play, then, that toys with the transformation of identity but that ultimately endorses something closer to the status quo. Robinson Crusoe, Morrison argues, is the work that most fully embraces the possibility of transformation, first by giving Crusoe the opportunity to create a new civilization, and second by showing how Crusoe undergoes a spiritual transformation. Crusoe, Morrison writes, “has reinvented himself both physically and spiritually” (120). Though Morrison is justly wary of an overly teleological story about shipwreck narratives, he does suggest that attitudes toward the new identities shift over time: “Staying on a new island as a new home appears to be a more modern tendency” (43).

Individual chapters about The Odyssey and The Tempest are followed by chapters about their literary and cinematic adaptations (as well as a few precursors). From Homer, Morrison transitions to the Egyptian “Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor” (c. 1900 BCE) and Derek Walcott’s The Odyssey: A Stage Version (1993) and Omeros (1990). From Shakespeare, he moves to St. Paul’s shipwreck at Malta, Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest (1968), and the film Forbidden Planet (1956). But it is Robinson Crusoe that is the most generative. Chapter Seven focuses on survival in Sophocles’s Philoctetes (409 BCE), Robert Zemeckis’s Cast Away (2000), and Rex Gordon’s First on Mars (1957). Chapter Eight, one of the most interesting in the book, compares treatments of Friday in Walcott’s play Pantomime (1980) and J.M. Cotezee’s Foe (1987). And Chapter Nine examines the post-shipwreck communities of Jules Verne’s 1874 The Mysterious Island (conflict resolved), William Golding’s 1954 Lord of the Flies (conflict exploded), and the 1960s sitcom Gilligan’s Island (conflict restaged each afternoon). The emphasis on Crusoe makes sense, for while the shipwrecks in Homer frame individual episodes, they are less thematically important than the act of traveling itself, and in The Tempest, it is the encounter with the other more than the shipwreck per se that has captured the imagination of later writers. By contrast, a Robinsonade without a shipwreck—or car wreck, plane wreck, or spaceship wreck—would seem to be no Robinsonade at all.

Morrison employs his comparative approach to show how fundamental features of shipwreck narratives are subsequently developed, helping us “appreciate the vitality of the archetypal scene of a shipwreck survivor confronting the elements” (7). Given that the three central works have been adapted, imitated, parodied, and remade as often as any in the canon, it is inevitable that readers will find themselves wishing for the inclusion of their own favorites or looking for a fuller justification for his selection beyond the brief claim to value “innovations on the basic pattern” and “artistic quality and philosophical influence” (7). (With influential texts by Swift, Cowper, Wyss, Bishop, Tournier, Ballard, and Martel, among many others, going unexamined, is it churlish to wonder which of these criteria justifies the inclusion of Gilligan’s Island?)

In his acknowledgments, Morrison notes that he has “attempted to present these ideas in a manner accessible to the general reader, as well as college and university students” (vii). Shipwreck narratives have an appeal that, if not universal, is certainly widespread, and there is real value to a jargon-free book that introduces the theme in a wide range of texts. In the process of writing an accessible book, however, Morrison has chosen not merely to relegate scholarly debates to the footnotes, but more problematically to minimize interpretive controversies altogether, a choice that flattens the texts under consideration. To take just one prominent example, Morrison’s central claim about Robinson Crusoe is that the novel shows the power of a shipwreck to elicit a spiritual transformation. Unlike in The Odyssey and The Tempest, the protagonist of Defoe’s novel embraces the opportunity that the island has offered for him to create a new life. “The greatest change Crusoe undergoes after the shipwreck,” Morrison writes, “is arguably his religious conversion, a ‘spiritual rebirth’” (117). Unfortunately, Morrison does not pursue the word “arguably,” for as the history of responses to Crusoe illustrates, that rebirth has always been contested. At the time of the novel’s publication, Charles Gildon complained about Crusoe’s mercurial willingness to change his religious allegiances to fit his circumstances. Rousseau included the conversion in the “rubbish” that ought to be cleansed from the novel. Marx dismissed the religious dimension entirely: “Of his prayers and the like we take no account, since they are a source of pleasure to him, and he looks upon them as so much recreation” (88). Subsequent critics—including Watt, Hunter, Starr, McKeon, and Richetti, just to name a few—have been similarly reluctant to take Crusoe’s religious claims as self-evident, instead situating them within contexts of emergent capitalism, Puritan autobiography, or casuistry. Repeatedly Morrison assures us that Crusoe has attained a “transformation” and a “new life,” but the nuances of what that life entails (or how it is upturned by the discovery of the cannibal footprint) are left virtually unexamined, diminishing the power of Defoe’s character and novel.

If the texts under consideration often feel flat, it is in part because of the way Morrison treats their relationship to history. His discussions of Homer, Shakespeare, Defoe, and Walcott all include sections on historical contexts, a useful gesture that promises to explain how universal themes are refracted through the prism of history. Morrison treats history, however, as relatively inert. So, for instance, as he describes the contexts of The Tempest, he writes, “The historical background to The Tempest comprises broad topics, such as Renaissance society and naval explorations, as well as specific events (the 1609 shipwreck) and texts, such as Montaigne’s essay ‘On the Cannibals’” (67). After briefly alluding to a Renaissance society of social mobility, he treats the Bermuda shipwreck and Montaigne’s essay as specific influences or “triggers” that Shakespeare adapts. Though the connections are plausible, one is left with the impression that these literary works reflect history, but rarely that they actively participate in it.

In the final chapter, Morrison suggests three reasons for the ubiquity of shipwreck narratives: the canonicity of texts that establish a link between shipwrecks and transformation, the capacity of shipwreck narratives to explore human nature in a controlled environment, and the aesthetic appeal of a narrative structured by the waves of the ocean. Perhaps an additional reason that shipwreck narratives have been so fruitful is that they are marvelously difficult to pin down. Cast away, marooned, or lost, the protagonists of these texts are often isolated not only in their survival but also in their narration, and the stories they tell can be contested as much as they can be indulged. Shipwrecked offers non-specialists a useful, broad survey of works that adapt the plot features of The Odyssey, The Tempest, and Robinson Crusoe. If readers are inspired to return to the turbulent texts themselves, Morrison’s book will have served a valuable purpose.

Evan R. Davis
Hampden-Sydney College

WORKS CITED

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. Charles H. Kerr & Co., Chicago: 1912. Print.

Among the persisting legacies of Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957) is the notion that eighteenth-century British fiction reflected the disenchanting tendencies of the Enlightenment. Just as natural philosophy renounced the supernatural—the view goes—the realist novel renounced the wonders that had been the typical fare of romance narratives. Accounts of the novel’s rise since Watt have shown that romance and its wonders retained an important presence in eighteenth-century fiction, but even revisionist accounts still tend to define wonder as what happens when realism is turned off. To question this division and claim a place for wonder within both novelistic realism and Enlightenment discourse is the governing purpose of Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Reinvention of Wonder.

According to Sarah Tindal Kareem’s insightful, complex argument, wonder never truly waned; instead, it was “reinvented” in increasingly sophisticated versions by eighteenth-century philosophers, aestheticians, and novelists, from David Hume and Joseph Addison to Henry Fielding and Jane Austen. In the absence of traditional sources of wonder such as superstitious belief or romance narratives, these authors discovered new sources of wonder in everyday experience, endowing both daily life and its representation in literature with a renewed power to solicit curiosity and admiration. Kareem’s account of these developments illuminates not only the persistence of wonder within the Enlightenment’s secular culture, but also a gradual shift in wonder’s functions—a shift with profound implications for the history of aesthetics. As Kareem shows in her remarkable first chapter, “Wonder in the Age of Enlightenment,” seventeenth-century thinkers like Descartes and Bacon regarded wonder as “an epistemological passion,” one that is able to “concentrate the attention as a means to an end: the acquisition of knowledge” (36). But wonder, they recognized, also has the capacity “to arrest attention, to delay recognition, and to suspend judgment,” which compromised its epistemic usefulness. According to Kareem, these particular features of wonder, which seventeenth-century philosophers considered from the point of view of epistemology, “become repurposed within eighteenth-century aesthetic theory” (37). While later theorists and fictionists continued to affirm wonder’s potential to inform the understanding, they also contended that wonder’s peculiar qualities could have another type of value—as a source of disinterested aesthetic experience.

Within the history of British prose fiction, the discovery of wonder’s aesthetic potential evolved in response to a new problem—the problem of how to preserve the attention of readers in the absence of striking novelty. As Bacon and Descartes had recognized, wonder about unfamiliar things fostered scientific curiosity or readerly investment. But “if critical attention requires wonder, which in turn requires novelty,” Kareem asks, “how can the mind critically attend to familiar objects?” Is it even possible to cultivate wonder towards the familiar, un-supernatural world that both philosophers and novelists were now making their province? According to Kareem it is, and a promising way of doing so emerged already in the seventeenth century, on three parallel fronts: the literature of travel, natural philosophy, and the Protestant doctrine of special providence. Each of these traditions sought to render the familiar world somehow strange, whether by looking at it through foreign eyes, or by examining the common objects of sense perception as if they were rare, or by drawing attention to ordinary facts as instances of God’s marvelous agency. Such defamiliarizing procedures, Kareem shows, reappeared with a vengeance in the context of eighteenth-century fiction, allowing novels to produce wonder even in the absence of supernatural marvels.

Retracing this complex story is the goal of the subsequent chapters. In Chapter 2, “Rethinking the Real with Robinson Crusoe and David Hume,” Kareem illustrates how defamiliarization could produce wonder in similar ways across the divide between philosophical and fictional discourse. She argues that both Defoe and Hume defamiliarize the world by revealing that features of it that we routinely take for granted are actually contingent; a realization of their contingency, in turn, generates a sense of wonder at the familiar. To show how this works, Kareem offers a compelling reading of Robinson Crusoe, giving special attention to the episode in which Crusoe discovers barley on the island. In narrating Crusoe’s discovery, Defoe initially refrains from using the term “barley,” describing the plant instead as “some few stalks of something green,” growing where no one would expect them, promising much needed sustenance. The novel thus frames that discovery not as a banal encounter with a well-known plant, but as a suspenseful realization of nature’s workings as signs of God’s providential presence. In Kareem’s words, “Crusoe’s delaying of the name ‘barley’ replicates his original ignorance as to what the plant was,” allowing readers to partake in the narrator’s own sense of wonder. By means of such narrative techniques, “Crusoe transmits his perception of bread as if it were miraculous to his readers” (101), awakening them to the remarkable dimensions of daily experience. Kareem reveals an analogous logic behind Hume’s skeptical crisis in A Treatise of Human Nature, claiming that Hume’s critique of induction reveals that natural processes we take for granted (such as the apparent connection between cause and effect) may instead be “a spectacular series of remarkable coincidences” (96)—a realization that makes the observable world a source of unceasing wonder. Like Defoe, Hume seeks to make this experience of wonder available to the reader by means of adequate narrative strategies. When describing the perplexity that attends on skepticism, he provides a vivid portrayal of himself as a shipwreck victim in a stormy sea. “The shipwreck metaphor,” Kareem argues, “does not merely figuratively render Hume’s own skeptically induced disorientation, but also acts upon the reader to produce the very disorientation it describes” (90). And it is disorientation not by traditional marvels but by the everyday world that grounds our phenomenal experiences.

Defamiliarization, as these examples go to show, was thus able to reinsert wonder into the interstices of real life. But the resulting narratives, Kareem notes, were then faced with a second issue: “the problem of how marvelous content could have any effect upon an essentially skeptical subject” (51). The concern, here, is that the awareness that tales of surprising adventures might not be true would make readers immune to the appeal of wonder. According to Kareem, eighteenth-century fiction developed resources to address this issue as well. The seeds of the solution can be found in Addison’s defense of narrative probability. “In Addison’s account, probability tempers the marvelous and thereby maintains the reader’s assent by preventing wonder from slipping into incredulity” (51). Early eighteenth-century narratives promoted a similar alternation between skepticism and credulity by means of “dissonant truth claims”—Kareem’s designation for the way fiction “at once asserts and denies the truth of its representations” (56). Just as defamiliarization elicited a form of wonder akin to a sense of marvel (wonder at the contents of a narrative), dissonant truth claims elicited a form of wonder akin to curiosity (wonder about the narrative’s truth status). This second sense of wonder is fully at play in the cases of Defoe and Hume. Robinson Crusoe and A Treatise of Human Nature lead readers to wonder whether Crusoe’s and Hume’s ordeals in tempestuous seas were indeed real, or whether they were merely allegorical (in Crusoe’s case) or ironic (in Hume’s). Neither book offers a clear answer, and “this indeterminacy reproduces for the reader the epistemological uncertainty that Crusoe and Hume face, thereby illustrating the broader historical point that early eighteenth-century fiction’s vexed truth status solicits wonder” (31).

This, however, is not the only way in which wonder was reinvented for the new times. As novelists became more willing to acknowledge that their plots were untrue, the epistemological indeterminacy securing the new sense of wonder lost traction. According to Kareem, this placed wonder under renewed critical pressure. “How did fiction,” she asks, “solicit wonder when it could no longer play on the indeterminacy of its truth status?” (110). In addressing this question, Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Reinvention of Wonder makes one of its most daring critical moves, reading the eighteenth-century British novel in light of contemporary developments in German aesthetics. According to Kareem, mid-century novelists in Britain envisioned a “heterocosmic” model of fiction similar to the one proposed by Alexander Baumgarten and the disciples of Christian Wolff in Germany (111-14). A novel, on this model, is less a description of the real world than an autonomous, self-sufficient new world, and it responds only to the demands of internal consistency. A heterocosmic novel, Kareem argues, no longer invites wonder at its content or about its truth; instead, it solicits two other types of wonder that no longer depend on the narrative’s resemblance to the real world: “suspense as cultivated by the narrative’s gaps, and admiration for the organizing presence that orchestrates the unified creation” (110, 117-8; my emphasis).

Kareem illustrates this second stage in the eighteenth-century reinvention of wonder through parallel readings of Tom Jones and The Castle of Otranto. By cultivating but then dispelling readerly entrancement through metacritical chapters or moments of deliberate absurdity, Fielding and Walpole lead readers to oscillate between engrossed suspense (directed towards the plot) and reflective admiration (directed towards the author). The heterocosmic model thus “allows engrossment in fiction’s alternative world…to coexist with appreciation for the fictional world as a created entity” (155). It ensures “the reader’s disinterested engagement with the text as an aesthetic object” (150), thus completing the shift from “an instruction-driven model of aesthetics toward a pleasure-driven model” (155). At this point, fiction fulfills the potential for disinterested pleasure already incipient in Hume’s skepticism. “Just as Hume is able to enjoy miracles by treating them ‘as if’ they were true, readers are similarly able to enjoy the wonders they are reading about by treating them ‘as if’ they were true, through a willing suspension of disbelief” (31). In time, wonder’s emergence as a source of disinterested aesthetic pleasure paved the way for “a non-instrumentalist model of art, that is, a view of art as an end in itself” (155). Kareem illustrates this final stage in wonder’s aesthetic reinvention through a fascinating reading of Rudolph Erich Raspe’s Baron Munchausen’s Narrative (1785), an unconventional text for studies of the novel’s rise which is one of the refreshing surprises of Kareem’s book.

In her last chapter, Kareem brings us to the turn of the nineteenth century, describing one final turn in wonder’s metamorphoses. She proposes that the admiration for individual genius solicited by Fielding and Walpole becomes an object of critique in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Both novels work by first encouraging readers to identify with the perspective of a skeptical character—whether Henry Tilney or Victor Frankenstein—and then undercutting that perspective by showing that too disengaged a skepticism may itself be a form of delusion. The alternative both novels promote is one in which critical disengagement allows room for the experience of wonder—wonder that can be enjoyed with proper critical awareness. Both novels promote the insight, central for Kareem’s thesis, that “disengagement, which at first appears to be the endpoint,” is instead “a way station en route to realizing a process of discovery through surprise that was also our point of departure” (13). This process, in which one overcomes credulous wonder through skepticism only to wonder again in a more reflective fashion, mirrors the movement of Humean skepticism: in the novel, as in Hume’s philosophy, the skeptic’s journey ends in a rediscovery of real life’s subtle marvels.

Kareem’s argument is in many ways more complex than my partial summary indicates. But even this brief survey shows that her genealogy of wonder’s mutations bears on a number of major critical fronts for eighteenth-century studies. To begin with, Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Reinvention of Wonder puts a new spin on the always healthy reminder that realism, while a useful category for historical analysis, should not be taken to define fiction’s fortunes in the wake of the Enlightenment. In Kareem’s version of this story, wonder persists not just in late revivals of romance such as the Gothic novel, but also within those realistic procedures that may seem predicated on wonder’s exclusion. Such a view also carries implications for the disenchantment thesis, as it shows that the old appeal of supernatural wonders was retooled by Enlightenment thinkers to new ends; once a sign of vulgar credulity, wonder became a sophisticated pleasure to be voluntarily enjoyed by the connoisseur. Finally, Kareem shows how conceptual categories usually associated with later stages in the history of aesthetics—“defamiliarization, narrative suspense, the willing suspension of disbelief, and the phenomenology of narrative enchantment” (5)—were already operative in eighteenth-century theories of wonder.

Kareem’s thesis, naturally, is not uncontroversial. For example, while I am persuaded by her account of wonder’s evolution, I am less compelled by the suggestion that novels came to be viewed as autonomous works of art already in the eighteenth century. Notions of aesthetic disinterestedness, it seems to me, gained currency much faster within German theoretical aesthetics than in British novel theory, where instrumental defenses of fiction remained dominant well into the nineteenth century. One might also question whether the book really avoids what Kareem calls “the typical ‘rise of the novel’ trajectory built around Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Laurence Sterne” (28-9). The aestheticization of wonder, for Kareem, accompanies the rise of “fiction” as a conceptual category, and she follows Catherine Gallagher in proposing that fiction achieves conceptual status once the novel has moved from pseudo-historical narratives to avowedly fictional ones. Such a progression from “true history” to an explicit fictionality seems indeed clear if we consider the history of British fiction as one that runs through the Defoe–Richardson–Fielding axis (the examples that organize Gallagher’s “Rise of Fictionality”), but it becomes harder to recognize when we zoom out of the usual canon to consider the variety of avowedly fictional forms that predated and accompanied it. A version of literary history that took into account how readers responded to those forms—including romance, secret histories, oriental tales, and, in the final analysis, even narrative poetry and drama—might have different implications for fictionality’s conceptual genesis, and possibly for the history of wonder’s metamorphoses as well. Maybe what I am expecting from Kareem, as from theorists of fiction in general, is a reassessment of Gallagher’s thesis—a reassessment which is already being undertaken by scholars including Emily H. Anderson, Nicholas Paige, and Susan Lanser, and in which Kareem promises to be an important voice as well. I am personally looking forward to her further thinking on this issue.

It is possible that readers of this book will not share the few reservations I outlined above, or maybe will have reservations of a different sort. Whichever is the case, they will certainly find in Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Reinvention of Wonder an invaluable contribution to its ever lively field. Kareem’s scholarly range is impressive, she has a keen eye for subtle conceptual differences, and she displays at every turn a remarkable command of both her primary and secondary sources. Her book will hopefully become mandatory reading for students of eighteenth-century aesthetics and of fiction’s place within it.

Roger Maioli
University of Florida

WORKS CITED

Gallagher, Catherine, “The Rise of Fictionality.” The Novel. Ed. Franco Moretti. Vol. 1. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006. Print.

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

This is a collection in search of a cosmology, to put it in the terms one of its editors, Kevin Cope, adopts in his “Conclusion.” There he claims that adaptability has been elevated to the level of the cosmological in the twenty-first century. In much the same way, this edited collection ranges widely, seeking for the constellation of subjects and issues that might help to explain how the notion of adaptation transformed from a sense of mere “fit-ness” (xxv) in the seventeenth century to universal approval and importance in the twenty-first.

It is a daunting task. While searching for that constellation, the book moves through an enormous number of examples, not all of which coexist in easily accessible ways. The collection’s individual essays are well documented and informative, but when used in its totality, the collection can seem to lack a unified set of concerns. Depending on the wishes of the reader, this may be an advantage or a disadvantage, and after reading this collection, I was more impressed than ever about the trouble of defining adaptability or adaptation, an idea I use quite frequently in my research. I realize now, for example, that the connotations I expect to be conveyed when I argue that Anglophone authors “adapt” English-language genres to the particularity of late-eighteenth-century India might not be as straightforward as I assume. I am sure I am not alone. Arguably, the majority of analysis in present-day studies of literature and culture depends on a notion of adaptation to identify change over time, whether it is the innovation in genres or the alteration of social forms, making this collection quite timely.

To produce an academic study of “adaptation” invites such troubles, of course, as the editors themselves make clear. Samara Anne Cahill warns from the outset that the contributors to the collection offer a “range of answers rather than a definitive or authoritative one” to the “complex awareness, pleasures, and frustrations that adaptation engenders” (xiii). Adaptation, she notes, is a “dynamic fidelity” (xiii) and one that eighteenth-century studies might be uniquely able to capture because it exists on “at the threshold of adaptation” (xiv).

Capturing the contradictory dynamism of fidelity is one central goal of the volume, as is assessing the connections between scholarship of the eighteenth century and the current social and political moment. This orientation toward the present is one of the most valuable qualities of the volume, and for Cahill, this revolves around crucial disciplinary questions that the volume can only partly resolve: is eighteenth-century studies more uniquely “at the threshold of adaptation” than other literary periods? If so, why? If not, how do we perceive change in history when it involves disparate notions of adaptation and innovation combined with conservation and tradition? How can scholars handle the vastness of the cultural and technological forces that contribute to adaptation, particularly when those adaptations are situated in a rapidly re-orienting world like that of the global eighteenth century?

The three sections of this collection—titled “Interdisciplinary Adaptations,” “Transnational Adaptations,” and “Gendered Adaptations”—reveal the always-rich (though sometimes strained) connections in the “range of answers” that Cahill admits. The first section, “Interdisciplinary Adaptations,” is representative; it includes Jessika Wichner’s chapter on the history of ballooning in the late eighteenth century and Gilles Massot’s account of his 2005 artistic installation, Valbelle, Myth of Fiction?, which repopulates the absent historical objects of an eighteenth-century French aristocrat’s estate using photography. Both essays pursue roundabout routes to comment on the rushing modernity of the eighteenth century, with Wichner explaining how ballooning experiments were public performances adapted to the changing reactions of its audiences, which shifted from avid interest to bored stagnation as ballooning became normalized and successful (30). These reactions are charted in her essay through an intriguing archive of newspaper accounts, histories, and poetry that reveal the “literary adaptation of the balloon” (30). Massot likewise seeks to “examine how human agency fails to adapt the external world to the stylized space of the esoteric garden” (3) by inserting photography into the landscape, an act he claims (incorrectly I think) reveals how Valbelle understood the “world was becoming an image” and that “twentieth-century Postmodernism wasn’t too far away” from its nineteenth-century Romantic precursors (7).

The second part, “Transnational Adaptations,” turns to the interactions of an insistently globalizing world. In her essay, Bärbel Czennia describes Chinese porcelain punch bowls as an example of intercultural “successful adaptation” (43). The punch bowls themselves are evidence of a new form of Western sociability: the conviviality and joy of gathering around a large drinking vessel (49). By examining punch drinking scenes in English fiction, she determines that punch crossed class lines and indicated the possibilities and anxieties of making the British into global citizens, often right at home over drinks. In this sense, punch bowls were an “alternate world history cast in porcelain” (46). In the spirit of alternate world histories, Shirley Chew brings eighteenth-century adaptability into close contact with the twenty-first century by assessing the adaptations of Jamaican poet Olive Senior. Adaptation of past cultural works is a strategy of postcolonial and decolonizing writing, Chew observes, citing the work of Derek Walcott, Aimé Césaire, and Senior herself (70). Senior’s poetry recasts William Beckford’s Fonthill Abbey, and its connections to the family’s Jamaica plantations and its slave population, as a “distinctive example” of this method.

The two essays of the third section, “Gendered Adaptations,” show the same interest in attaching eighteenth-century adaptations to twenty-first-century incarnations. Essays by Susan Spencer and Nhu Nguyen and by Kathryn Duncan engage in the difficult work of cross-national and multilingual eighteenth-century scholarship. The former essay combines an account of Romantic period British literature with an examination of two of Vietnam’s best-known eighteenth-century poets, whose verse circulated orally and in manuscript. Noting the multicultural (primarily Chinese) influences on this verse, and situating them in the violent political upheavals of Vietnam, Spencer and Nguyen propose a different kind of adaptability for eighteenth-century studies, one that accounts for disciplinary discussions that move across languages, nations, and regions. Most valuable here is their emphasis on linguistic translation of less-known archives as a method to push beyond the otherwise prevalent tilt in global eighteenth-century studies toward European empires.

Duncan examines the transformation of the anti-pirate rhetoric of the early eighteenth century into the “playful modern pirate iconography” of Pirates of the Caribbean and Captain Morgan Spiced Rum. She proposes that pirates, then as now, present problems of epistemology, of how one might identify a pirate (as opposed to, say, a privateer) (91). She offers evolutionary psychology’s idea of Theory of Mind as a way to understand how the assessment of the pirate as a “violent criminal engaging in illegal, reprehensible acts” could adapt into Johnny Depp’s lovable Jack Sparrow. Conceiving of pirates as “cheaters,” “defectors,” and “free riders,” as those who resist the reciprocal relationships of altruism, Duncan claims “evolutionary psychology explains the exaggerated angry response to pirates that we find not only in law but in print” during the eighteenth century (95, 96, 97). This evolutionary biological sense accords with the arguments of others, such as Daniel Heller-Roazen, who has noted that pirates have been seen as the “common enemy of all” since classical antiquity (16, 22). And Duncan’s account presents a provocative turn on recent scholarship that piracy, especially black piracy, was egalitarian and proto-democratic (as found in the writing of W. Jay Bolster, Marcus Rediker, Peter Linebaugh, and Kenneth Kinkor). Still, it seems odd to suggest that pirates have been entirely defused in the twenty-first century when the resurgence of interest in Somali piracy makes them the cinematic villains of films such as Captain Phillips (2013) and when piracy remains the only crime in which nations agree to universal jurisdiction.

As these descriptions of the collection’s contents indicate, there is an insistent relevancy to these essays. Such relevancy is the particular aim of the two anchoring essays of the collection, its “Introduction” on ecology and adaptation by David Fairer and its “Conclusion” on the crises of adaptability by Cope.

Fairer’s “Introduction” uses ecology to establish some wider principles about adaptation, and many of the other contributors cite it. Adaptation, he suggests, has “undergone significant shifts of meaning” from celebration of a “perfectly designed creation” to “life’s stable purposiveness or continual reshaping,” all of which “articulate contrasting views of creation” (xxvi). He humorously notes that our current notion of adaptation is “like the modern electrical adapter” in that it “assumes an element of modification and adjustment,” but its early modern origins, Fairer observes, emphasized “fit” more than “change” (xxv). It was not until the nineteenth century that the transitive sense of adaptation as modification becomes apparent in the English language, which Fairer attributes to the recognition of the “inherent tendency in all living things to adapt to their environment” (xxx).

These “subtle shades of meaning” of adaptation “moved, unevenly but inexorably” toward its modern notion that adaptation is a force “relative and responsive” that we might perceive as important to developments “not only in the concept of Nature but in our apprehension of human art, human designs, human adaptability” (xliii). Literary aesthetic and generic change plays a crucial role in this inexorable movement, and Fairer offers the georgic as an exemplum. The georgic was the literature of “a changing economy” in which “the earth challenges mankind to adapt to its shifting moods” (xxxiii). This is a lovely sense of the georgic and its role in our ideas of climate. It is one that is still relevant to how humans perceive the global ecosystem as possessing its own personality, evident in our twenty-first-century anthropomorphisms of Mother Earth or of Gaia complexes. Sadly for all of us in a time of rapid climate change, the Earth cannot be reasoned with, and its moods cannot be appeased, though our persistent imaginations of a sentient Earth seem to displace our own effects upon it.

This is a “dynamic,” Fairer argues, that “humanity shares with the natural world as a non-human agent of change,” but what is lacking in this essay is how our understanding of adaptability as it was shaped by eighteenth-century art, science, and literature might dislodge us from our constrained political debate over climate change. Such an answer might be impossible to provide, but Fairer does offer a well-informed sense of how our attitudes about changing Nature derives from the thinking of our predecessors.

Kevin Cope valiantly tries to address my concerns for contemporary relevancy in his “Conclusion.” Recalling the difficulties Cahill identifies in her “Preface,” Cope laughs that adaptation must be “one of the most adaptable words in international English” (127). For Cope, we inherit from the eighteenth century a sense that adaptation is about “revising the present so it might anticipate the better future” (129), but it is not clear to me that a period which celebrates neoclassicism is one that has a “unidirectional commitment to the future” and is “critical of the past,” as Cope suggests (129). More useful I think is his proposition that the eighteenth century “relished crisis moments” (129). This remains the prevailing orthodoxy of eighteenth-century studies: that adaptation to the period’s crises—whether the crises in authorship and authenticity that Susan Stewart notes in Crimes of Writing, or the crisis in epistemology that Michael McKeon describes in The Secret History of Domesticity, or the crises of the British empire debated by Nicholas Dirks and others, or the many other crisis we have still to discover—were pivotal to the creation of the modern world we still recognize.

Cope’s sense is that the adaptability of the eighteenth century has “set the stage for later eras including our own,” which he terms the “great era of adaptation” (147). Cope seems to lament the rapid alterations of our current era, unlike many of the other contributors, who seem enthusiastic that the artistic and cultural adaptions of those “citizens of the world” noted in the collection’s title demonstrated nimbleness, agility, and collaboration. Cope worries that in our current era of adaptation “anything might well be anything,” and “wavering identities whirl in a mix of happy class mobility and miserable personal confusion” (147). This seemingly not-great era has “raised adaptation to the level of…a cosmology,” organizing everything around it.

Cope is certainly right that we should we wary of a uniformly sanguine sense of adaptation at a time when it is most strongly aligned with champions of economic “disruption” and “innovation,” whose ideas have been critiqued by Jill Lepore and others. That still does not explain his conclusion’s grudge against the results of modernity’s robust aspiration to craft a better future through adaptation. Sure, cultural change can lead to what Cope calls “our fascination with con-men and impostors” and what he seems to think is a disturbing “enthusiasm for shows about sudden change of social status such as Britain’s Got Talent or The Next Food Network Star” (147). But con-men and impostors have been with us from the beginning. And while food shows might not be everyone’s favorite leisure activity, this collection demonstrates, with its wide range, that in science and literature, art and culture, humans have an almost overwhelming reservoir of examples of adaptability to draw upon and, being adaptable themselves, they most certainly will.

James Mulholland
North Carolina State University

WORKS CITED

Bolster, W. Jeffrey. Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997. Print.

Dirks, Nicholas B. The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2006. Print.

Heller-Roazen, Daniel. The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations. New York: Zone Books, 2009. Print.

Kinkor, Kenneth. “Black Men under the Black Flag.” In Bandits at Sea: A Pirates Reader. Ed. C.R. Pennell. New York: New York UP, 2001. Print.

Lepore, Jill. “The Disruption Machine: What the Gospel of Innovation Gets Wrong.” New Yorker 23 June (2014): n. pag. NewYorker.com. Web. Sept. 2016.

Linebaugh, Peter and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000. Print.

McKeon, Michael. The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005. Print.

Rediker, Marcus. Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004. Print.

Stewart, Susan. Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Print.

This collection of essays dedicated to George Starr concentrates on Professor Starr’s interest in the novel and the ways in which sentimentality impacted fiction during the eighteenth century. More particularly the essays spin off from an essay by Professor Starr, “Only a Boy,” published in Genre in 1977. That essay argued that the male protagonist of sentimental novels could not satisfy the requirement of the hero of the Bildungsroman, because he does not, indeed cannot, grow in any significant way. Professor Starr begins his discussion with Defoe’s Colonel Jack. He argues that Jack never grows out of regarding himself as a child and hence essentially innocent. Although the title of Professor Starr’s essay is based upon a moment in Huckleberry Finn, when the narrator escapes a dangerous situation by pleading his status as a child and hence not guilty of any act that might have been interpreted as evil, Colonel Jack makes similar pleas by way of excusing his actions. Professor Starr argues that Jack resembles the protagonist of the sentimental novel in this continuing naiveté, his blundering attempts at marriage, and his lack of any real growth. This pattern certainly plays its way into Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey and Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling. As for Frances Burney’s Evelina, the female protagonist it shows to possess the characteristics of the hero of sentiment without problems, since some child-like qualities and complete sexual innocence were the ideals of the heroines of the sentimental novel.

Although only a few of the essays only touch peripherally on this particular essay, many deal with aspects of emotion and how emotion should be regarded in relation to character. For example, George Haggerty’s essay on William Godwin’s Caleb Williams treats the complexities of friendship as embodying a degree of hatred and danger. He makes use of Jacques Derrida’s discussion of the complexities of friendship to demonstrate how Caleb’s desire for intimacy leads to the destruction of the relationship. And Simon Stern’s discussion of the sensibility involved in the Richardson-Fielding conflict interprets the ways in which Fielding could never entirely give up a degree of contempt that he had for Richardson’s epistolary method, reading into the end of Fielding’s famous letter to Richardson in praise of Clarissa something less than the wholehearted praise that Martin Battestin saw in that letter. In a subtle reading, Stern views Richardson’s unpublished response to Fielding’s praise a not entirely unwarranted anger toward the author of Tom Jones. And in the process, he provides an amusing reading of the adoring praise of Richardson’s work. James P. Carson’s “The Sentimental Animal” treats the ways in which animals play a mediating role in sentimental novels such as Sterne’s Sentimental Journey. No longer the Cartesian mechanism in a world that values feeling above thought, animals such as Yorick’s starling can communicate what the loss of freedom actually means. Carson sees the bird as affording Yorick access to his emotional life. And in Mary Robinson’s Walsingham sympathy for animals becomes the touchstone for distinguishing true from false sensibility. In Romanticism, sympathy for animals becomes part of the “pantheistic force that unites all beings.” In these final pages, Carson concentrates on a children’s story by John William Polidori, “A Story of Miss Anne and Miss Emma with the Dog—Carlo,” a work in which the dog’s speechlessness becomes a virtue and his emotions raise him to the level of a sentimental hero. One point mentioned but not developed in this complex essay is a relationship between the tableaux of the sentimental novel and the structure of pornographic fiction. Amy J. Pawl’s essay, “Only a Girl,” deals with Elizabeth Inchbald’s “A Simple Story” as a typical sentimental novel. She argues that Miss Milner’s liveliness in the first part should not be taken as admirable. Her passion for Elmwood is uncontrollable, and her disgrace and death reveals that. Her loving with “the passion of an mistress and the tenderness of a wife” is all wrong. On the other hand, her daughter, Matilda, is the perfect sentimental heroine. She marries Rushbrook at the end, but he is a weak and dependent figure. Her real love is for her father—a love approaching incest, as Pawl notes, recalling the old song, “her heart belongs to daddy.”

A fair number of essays deal directly with Defoe. Using an extensive number of contemporary books on servants, Barbara Benedict treats Amy in Roxana as Defoe’s example of a bad servant. She discusses the Amy-Roxana relationship as a form of joint insanity. Employing Defoe’s Family Instructor volumes and Religious Courtship, Alison Conway examines the notion of religious conflict in marriages between men and women of differing Christian beliefs. Acknowledging Defoe’s warnings against such marriages, she comes to the conclusion that Defoe puts an emphasis on sociability and communication. On the matter of sociability, she sees Defoe actually coming somewhat close to the advice of the Third Earl of Shaftesbury. Joanna Picciotto’s essay begins by demonstrating how Professor Starr’s reading of the pot in The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe showed how limited was Virginia Woolf’s reading of Defoe’s work as being about a very real pot rather than the beauty of the ocean and the sky. But the rest of the essay, on Defoe’s use of detail to create a sense of reality, never entirely explains the nature of Defoe’s realist fiction.

Geoffrey Sill’s “‘Only a Boy’: George Starr’s ‘Notes on Sentimental Novels’ Revisited,” sees similarities between Huckleberry Finn’s excuse of being “only a boy,” and Colonel Jack’s excuses for thieving activities as a street urchin in London, but he disagrees somewhat on the question of whether Colonel Jack might be considered an early Bildungsroman. Sill sees considerable growth and change in Jack as by the end, he has a mature relationship with his wife, he has attained the kind of knowledge that, for Defoe, constituted the attainment of a true gentleman, and he has achieved a firm set of Christian beliefs. In Jack’s struggles toward these achievements, he is very different from the static, impotent protagonist of the sentimental novel. On the other hand, Professor Sill views Professor Starr’s arguments about the Sentimental hero as a significant alternative to Ian Watt’s arguments about realism.

The final essay, by John Richetti, recounts his experiences in approaching eighteenth-century poetry through oral recitation (“declamation”). In some ways, his approach represents an appeal to “authenticity” similar to that of some of the New Criticism. He argues for the importance of declamation in evaluating the excellence of verse—what sounds like genuine emotion and what not: Swift, Pope, Johnson, yes; Gray, no. Richetti has a brilliant analysis of Swift’s savage elegy on Marlborough, but while Swift conveys his anger and hatred with wonderful power, I never read it without being aware of Swift’s Tory leanings, his seeming personal pique, or that Marlborough helped to defeat Louis XIV, the persecutor of the Huguenots and the enemy of the liberties of surrounding nations. “The paths of glory lead but to the grave,” Gray tells us movingly on a similar theme, and even Johnson (along with almost everyone else toward the end of the eighteenth century) felt that Gray’s musings on the role of the poor in history was effective poetry. Of course, Richetti’s main objection is to what he considers to be an excessively sentimental portrayal of the “poet” at the end of the Elegy. But whether one agrees with him or not, Richetti emerges as an excellent reader of poetry. And his essay is a splendid way to end this tribute to one of the finest modern scholars of eighteenth literature.

Maximillian E. Novak
University of California, Los Angeles

Karen Downing’s study of masculine identity in colonial Australia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries identifies Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) as an important reference point for both transported felons and voluntary migrants. “The promise of Robinson Crusoe—that a man could be both adventurer and settler, both wild and domesticated—was the promise made to men about the Australian colonies,” she writes (173). The promoters of colonization and emigration pushed this connection, aware that men who might be inclined to undertake the journey had been reared on Crusoe and stories like it. Sure enough, the men actually making the voyage embraced the identification with Crusoe and thought about their departure from Britain for the antipodes as an adventure akin to those undertaken by Defoe’s castaway. Convicts, too, could use the experience of Crusoe’s transition from slave to castaway to master of himself and his new world territory in order to come to terms with their situation.

As Richard Phillips states, in the nineteenth century “the Robinson Crusoe story was canonized as the archetypal modern adventure story” (25), and Downing’s study attests to a part of that larger process. Downing identifies “many echoes” of Crusoe in private writings by men of this era, men who were working out their masculinity in terms of a desire to roam and dominate, as well as to settle and domesticate. Accordingly, Downing finds that “Robinson Crusoe was…a conceptual framework or discourse or metanarrative which gave meaning to men’s actions and circumstances: it mediated the way men experienced the world and conceived of themselves as subjects” (173–74). And Crusoe, as a range of recent works of scholarship investigating its diverse cultural afterlives has demonstrated, provided a “framework” as malleable as it was durable and accessible (e.g. Fallon, Acquisto, O’Malley).

Downing’s book is, like Shawn Thomson’s The Fortress of American Solitude: Robinson Crusoe and Antebellum Culture (2009), a study of Crusoe as what Thomson calls a “topos of masculinity” (31). In his account of the United States from 1815 to 1861, Thomson establishes that Crusoe was a mainstay of boyhood reading, ubiquitous in libraries, and a reference point for numerous tales of solitary adventuring in the expanding nation. But unlike for Thomson’s account, one wonders whether Crusoe is absolutely necessary for Downing’s arguments. It is odd, for instance, that “Robinson Crusoe” appears in the book’s title but “Australia” does not. The book will interest literary scholars keen to know yet more about the uses to which Defoe’s novel has been put, but make no mistake, its main readership is historians of Australia in the half-century after HMS Supply landed in Botany Bay. Downing’s study addresses changing conceptions of manhood in relation to discourses of medicine, education, social rank, religion, and the family, as well as colonization. Crusoe evidently proved useful at this historical moment in this locale: men were thought about as naturally active rather than sedentary; they aspired to independence gained by land ownership and labor; they anticipated and experienced solitude, despair, and confrontations with indigenous peoples; they fretted about the enervating effects of civil society and the deleterious consequences of social mobility. Robinson Crusoe could help with all these matters as well as it could help the sedentary Gabriel Betteredge from Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), for whom it was a “friend in need in all the necessities of life” (Collins 22). But Downing’s study—thankfully—is not confined to how this range of concerns was addressed by invocations of Defoe’s novel alone. In several chapters there are a few nods to Crusoe where an original source has obligingly mentioned it, but for large parts, Crusoe is incidental not intrinsic to the argument. It is testament to the power of the Crusoe myth that it has shaped a modern historian’s approach to Australian colonization, even at times when it has not (apparently) shaped the accounts left by the migrants themselves.

The direct references to Crusoe in the book’s primary materials are certainly important evidence of the reach of Defoe’s story. Here are some examples from Downing’s impressive trawl of the archives: “When Peter Cunningham described escaped convicts on Kangaroo Island as ‘Robinson Crusoes,’ when ex-convict settler James Munro’s newspaper obituary was headed ‘The Tasmanian Crusoe,’ and when John Morgan called ‘wild white man’ William Buckley ‘the real Crusoe’ in the published account of his life with Aborigines, it is not clear whether Crusoe is being invoked to highlight a solitary life, a settler’s life or an uncivilized life” (5). Of course, it is all three, and sometimes in overlapping ways: “It is this slipperiness of usage that underlines Crusoe’s success as a potent symbol—he and his story meant different things to different men, yet created a perception of a shared understanding of the character and his interactions with the world” (5). The agency in the final clause is a bit odd: Crusoe and his story created a shared understanding of his character. Actually the idea is that cultural contexts of migration and masculinity created this shared perception, and indeed the majority of the book is concerned with delineating the social conditions into which occasional Crusoe references are inserted. Downing moves between larger understandings of changing masculinity in the late Georgian period and more particular manifestations in Australian-related texts.

Restless Men comprises eight chapters. The first deals with social perceptions that civilization, politeness, and luxury had baneful effects on men’s health. The second examines travel and attendant ideas of self-discovery and maturation. The third moves to the education of boys and their becoming men, and chapter 4 tackles the place of seafaring in Australian-British national identity and how it intersected with masculine ideals. The fifth chapter considers attitudes to land ownership and independence in relation to migrants’ experiences, while chapter 6 turns to anxieties about social mobility, the feminizing effects of consumerism, and the difficulties of reading a person’s inner worth through contingent, extrinsic markers of social rank. Chapter 7 addresses “men’s ambivalent relationship with authority” (129); it examines convicts’ legal experiences at a time when the state was increasingly claiming a monopoly on violence that diminished individual autonomy. The final chapter considers attitudes to the family—increasingly central to ideas of adult manhood—as paradoxical, both “the reason for leaving and the reason for returning” (150). Throughout the book, Downing demonstrates a sure hand with the historiography and draws dexterously on contemporary conduct literature as well as private writings. The book is highly recommended to those interested in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century sociocultural history, particularly of gender and empire. Scholars of Defoe will want to dip in at the very least.

Nicholas Seager
Keele University

WORKS CITED

Acquisto, Joseph. Crusoe and other Castaways in Modern French Literature: Solitary Adventures. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2012. Print.

Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone. Ed. Sandra Kemp. London: Penguin, 1998. Print.

Fallon, Ann-Marie. Global Crusoe: Comparative Literature, Global Theory and Transnational Aesthetics. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011. Print.

O’Malley, Andrew. Children’s Literature, Popular Culture, and Robinson Crusoe. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Print.

Philips, Richard. Mapping Men and Empire: Geographies of Adventure. London: Routledge, 1997. Print.

Thomson, Shawn. The Fortress of American Solitude: “Robinson Crusoe” and Antebellum Culture. Madison and Teaneck, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2009. Print.

Recounting the pleasures of reading The Mysteries of Udolpho, Catherine Morland confesses that she finished the book in “two days—my hair standing on end the whole time” (77). For Jane Austen, Catherine’s tendency to confuse Gothic fiction with reality is a source of humor, and the engine that sets Northanger Abbey’s parody of romance and its readers in motion. For Jayne Lewis, however, Catherine’s description of her “hair standing on end” is as significant a demonstration of the real effects of atmosphere as any of Boyle’s experiments with an air pump (249). In fact, Air’s Appearance returns to this image of the reader so enthralled that she experiences a physical thrill over and over again, and like the eighteenth-century natural philosophers who made air visible by describing its effects on a rusting hinge or darkening flesh, Lewis conjures her research questions from the air around the subject she studies. How, she wonders, do the abstractions of fiction acquire the power to elicit a physical response? Where are we, really, when we spend time in fictional worlds? What, if any, is the difference between our encounters with fiction’s apparitions and our experiences outside of a novel?

Air’s Appearance argues that these imaginative experiences are real, even if the fictions that inspire them are not and that the literary atmosphere that holds the avid reader in its grip shares a great deal with the theories about the composition and effects of circulating at the time that it took shape. Distinguishing her work from what she calls the more “conventionally interdisciplinary” approaches of other ecohistorians of the long eighteenth century (including Alvin Snider, Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Rajani Sudan, Eric Gidal, and Robert Markley), Lewis also argues that the close study of “literary experiments” with the effects of unseen forces offers a privileged view of the otherwise invisible mediating role of language in the history of air’s appearance (4). To inhabit a fictional world, after all, is to adopt a habit of mind that can make nothing feel like something—so the tools we use to interrogate these fictions, Lewis argues, are uniquely suited to analyzing the similarly elusive qualities of atmosphere.

To this end, Lewis presents two related eighteenth-century histories of air. In one story, scientists from Boyle to Priestley search for the words to distinguish each invisible and immaterial aspect of the air from the equally invisible and immaterial “aether” composed of all these airy parts; in the other, writers from Pope to Radcliffe examine the mediating effect of text that—like a mist over the world it describes—makes it easier to see otherwise transparent influences at work on the characters (usually women) at the center of their stories. By approaching scenes from the history of science as if they are also scenes from the history of reading, Lewis discovers that all of these characters are engaged in the same activity: from laboratory to library, these are stories about putting the air into words.

Starting with the scientists, Chapter 1 explores how the “composition” of nomenclature to describe the air is necessarily shaped by available theories of the “composition” of the air itself. As this argument suggests, Lewis’s style is often punning, trailing “clouds of association” around key words to draw patterns out of what appear to be coincidences (27). At one point, for instance, Lewis observes a parallel between the electricity a book transmits when struck by lightning and the fairies that enter the realm of imagination when a reader encounters a story about them. In each encounter, a book persuades us to believe in an invisible force—and this, Lewis concludes, is how words on the page become real. Chapter 2 repeats this pattern, pulling apart the multiple meanings that activate a pun to expose the aesthetic aspects of “spring,” or the elastic capacity Boyle identified as proof of the difference between “common air” and the “aether” in which it is suspended. Under pressure, however, Lewis finds that this distinction feels a lot like the difference Milton observes between the prelapsarian aether in which Adam and Eve exist and the strange substance (air) that closes in around them after the fall. By giving a name to “common air,” Lewis argues, Boyle has changed his readers’ state, too—both evicting us from the unknowing condition that made our atmosphere appear to be as uniform as it was invisible and yoking our awareness of the air around us to our comprehension of one particular medium (words in English).

Closing the chapter with a more literal relationship between air and articulation, Lewis notes that Boyle stutters. These biographical anecdotes sometimes seem at odds with the figurative language that drives so much of the book’s argument, but here Lewis treats Boyle’s stutter as an illustration of his own theory of “spring,” or an embodied response to the encroachments of “common air.” Invoking Jean-Louis Barrault’s theory of character in action, Lewis explains that for an actor, a stutter might be an “air” put on to make otherwise unseen, even unknowable, aspects of both a character and the world in which she moves more legible. By lingering over Boyle’s stutter, then, Lewis performs her own experiment with the elastic capacity of “the air,” stretching the concept to include the social mores that surround us as well as the stuff we breathe.

In Chapter 3, Lewis turns to the transparent literary artifice that makes these social airs apparent. Not unlike a mist cast over a god on stage, she suggests, which renders him invisible to those within the world of the play and visible only to those outside it, Pope’s sylphs “show the show,” revealing both the “air of probability” established by the poem’s demand that we accept them and the possibility that other unseen forces—not sylphs, but something—might also exist in the world outside the frame, clustering around real women in the same way sylphs gather around Belinda (85). It is these self-consciously fantastical features, Lewis argues, that make The Rape of the Lock such an important precedent for subsequent eighteenth-century writing about the illusions women cultivate to navigate social worlds in which appearances matter more than substance, and such a useful illustration of the similar operations of belief at work in both the world of the poem and the world it describes.

Chapter 4 further interrogates this operation of belief that transforms the mark on the page into the matter of the mind’s eye. Meditating upon the hygrometer, Lewis observes a parallel between technologies that measure humidity with paper exposed to air and the terms eighteenth-century weather-watchers developed to communicate atmospheric conditions across time and space. In both cases, air’s appearance is rendered with marks capable of conjuring the sensation of specific conditions, or ambiguous phrases such as “it is cold,” the subject of which is necessarily both the condition out of doors and the body of the writer. To understand these records, Lewis observes, readers must fill the gap between the cold and the body that feels it with the operation of our minds—and that willingness to believe in an atmospheric condition based on the record of its effects on the page is no less powerful when we engage with a fictional world. To demonstrate, Chapter 5 considers the equally powerful effects of writing about what might not be in the air at all: apparition narratives, among which Lewis includes Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. Observing that eighteenth-century readers were less likely to conceive of apparitions as supernatural entities than as evidence of a problem with the eye’s ability to capture visual reality, Lewis approaches the genre as a textual record of an appearance, and thus a useful counterpoint to John Bender’s claim that the plain style of realistic fiction seems to “disappear” as writing (112). By simulating both the agent of perception and its object, Lewis argues, the apparition narrative both “perform[s] and trigger[s] an intricate mental process” by which the reader takes on the same role as the person who encountered the appearance, and the text thus makes it possible for others to “see” the apparition (120).

In Chapter 6, Lewis proposes that Tom Jones treats the same problem by exploring where we are when we spend time in a fictional world. By beginning each book with a chapter positioning the reader outside of the fictional world in which the rest of the story unfolds, Fielding both reminds the reader of the gap between the world of the story and our own and draws attention to the verbal art with which he has otherwise collapsed it. As a result, Lewis concludes, Fielding’s readers can only see through this verbal art by looking right at it. Chapter 7 considers the opposite side of this coin. In The Female Quixote, Lewis observes, Arabella is punished for failing to differentiate between fiction and reality, but she only comes to appreciate the consequences of her actions when she learns to see the appearance she presents to others. To draw out this similarity between the apparitions of fiction and the apparitions of social selves, Lewis considers the paradox of Arabella’s punishment alongside the work of Joseph Glanvill, a clergyman and natural philosopher who posited standards of evidence for evaluating encounters with ghosts. If, as Glanvill suggests, there is no meaningful difference between imagining an encounter with an apparition and a real encounter with an apparition, Lewis posits that The Female Quixote is also a study in just how similar the world of Arabella’s fiction is to the social world she uses these stories to navigate: both, of course, are organized by mere appearances.

Returning to the laboratory, Chapter 8 finds Priestley working to identify the component parts of the seemingly homogenous subject Boyle called “common air.” For Lewis, Priestley’s project—transforming “the air” into a theater of airs—further illustrates the man-made dimensions of knowledge, or the extent to which the facts of air’s composition remain apparitional, upheld only by shared belief. Though Priestley gives each part its own name (“mephitic air,” “fixed air”), all share a common surname (“air”), a reference to the essential but indistinct quality this new nomenclature still cannot bring into focus—and a failure doubled by the fact that Priestley never quite managed to distinguish the life-sustaining function of “vital air” (now oxygen) from these other “factitious airs.” To accept Priestley’s theater of airs, Lewis argues, is therefore to embrace a view of ourselves “enthralled to a materially immaterial environment” we cannot ever really know (217)—and so it should be no surprise that, as Chapter 9 elaborates, this is precisely the same state of belief that Gothic authors, including Radcliffe, aim to cultivate in their readers. By withholding natural explanations for the terrors she describes, Radcliffe further affirms that the air of a seemingly supernatural encounter is no less real than the air of an unsettling encounter with something more straightforward, and proves, by extension, that the shiver we experience when reading Udolpho is no less real than any other kind.

By the time that Lewis returns, once again, to this image of the shivering reader, her own readers might find themselves in the position of the spectators in Wright’s Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump: suddenly able to see, in the light of this two-headed history of science and letters, the air rising from the page to hold us in its thrall. When it comes to identifying the wider implications of the research that has cast this new light on literary atmosphere, however, Air’s Appearance is more suggestive than conclusive. For instance, though Lewis does not explicitly articulate the significance of the parallel she observes between the methods male scientists developed to explain the operations of the air and the anxieties swirling around the methods female readers developed to navigate similarly unseen social forces, the history she presents has exposed an important avenue for further research on how gender has shaped these debates. Likewise, though Air’s Appearance does not address itself to ecocritics, Lewis’s research on how the description of something seen only through its effects can acquire enough power to move a body certainly provides a useful model for writing about slow environmental catastrophe. Among the more surprising of these subtle suggestions arising from the book, furthermore, is the rebuttal Air’s Appearance offers to the rumored death of the humanities. At a moment when scholars across disciplines face a growing demand for objective standards to measure both the impact of their research and the outcome of enduring engagement with their primary sources, Lewis has leveraged studies in the history of science to demonstrate that the space scholars of literature invite students to inhabit while reading these old books is real and that the evidence we need to illustrate the effect of this reading is already in the air, as substantial as anything developed to maintain our belief in oxygen itself. If it is true, then, that the real influences of both air and writing are guaranteed by their effects on others, there is no need to worry about Lewis’s arguments disappearing into the aether: even without naming these political pressures, Air’s Appearance offers other scholars of literature the tools to explain how and why fictional worlds matter—and the words to make the effects of our work to illuminate those worlds more visible.

Morgan Vanek
University of Calgary

WORKS CITED

Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey, Lady Susan, The Watsons, Sandition. Ed. John Davie and James Kinsley. New York: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008.