XII
The Eighteenth Century
This chapter has four sections: 1. General and Prose; 2. The Novel; 3. Poetry;
4. Drama. Section 1 is by Katarina Stenke; section 2 is by Bonnie Latimer;
section 3 is by Kerri Andrews; section 4 is by Chrisy Dennis.
1. General and Prose
This year’s publications in eighteenth-century prose and general literary
studies cover, as always, many topics, but certain themes and authors have
received more than common attention. The ongoing reconceptualization of the
eighteenth-century world of letters receives further impetus from new research
into transnational and intercultural exchange and collaboration, into women’s
writing and gender studies, and into marginal or hard-to-define genres such as
diaries, letters, and satire. Author-centric studies also continue to flourish:
once again this year, the latest instalments of the Cambridge University Press
edition of Swift’s works have been complemented by research publications
addressing his life and writings from a variety of perspectives, with a
noticeable emphasis on textual history; among women writers, three
Elizabeths—Montagu, Carter, and Singer Rowe—have been particularly
popular. Quite aside from the sense of discovery afforded by many of the titles
under review, the sheer quantity and variety of publications in the field attest
to the vigour of eighteenth-century studies beyond the major genres.
Variety and ingenuity are especially noticeable in the methodological
approaches employed in recent scholarship, no doubt partly in response to the
extended data sets and new analytical possibilities afforded by digitization, but
often also as part of salutary reassessments of the category of ‘the literary’ in
the light of occasional, epistolary, scientific and philosophical or religious
writings of the period. As an initial example of such inventiveness one could
cite Jonathan Lamb’s SEL review of ‘Recent Studies in the Restoration and
Eighteenth Century’ (SEL 53[2013] 667–737), in which he departs somewhat
from the conventional review structure and sets his accounts of recent
scholarship—focusing mainly on monographs, and paying due homage to the
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KATARINA STENKE, BONNIE LATIMER, KERRI ANDREWS
AND CHRISY DENNIS
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recent flourishing of eighteenth-century scholarship at the Bucknell University
Press—within discursive surveys of themes that have interested scholars in
recent years, often noting sources and approaches that might complement the
works under review. Foregrounded trends and topics include the turn to
material culture and the related interest in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
Epicureanism, and the developing concepts of personhood or identity as
evidenced by it-narratives and the early novel.
Several of these themes remained popular throughout 2013. Susan
Manning’s The Poetics of Character: Transatlantic Encounters 1700–1900
moves beyond the period limits of this review but deserves full notice here
nonetheless for the intriguing comparative methodology it elucidates from the
mutually constructed understandings of character and analogy/metaphor that
it discovers in the works of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers such as Francis
Hutcheson, David Hume, Hugh Blair, and Dugald Stewart. In these writings
and in this period of British and transatlantic history, Manning argues,
‘ ‘‘character’’ was partly a means for designating terms of interaction between
strangers, a possible solution to the puzzle of how to ‘‘read’’ others in a
rhetorical world in which criteria of legibility based in local relations and
physical presence no longer pertained’ (p. 22). Bringing together ‘the literary
and the historical’ (p. 23), Enlightenment ‘character’ (whether individual or
national) and the New Rhetorical ‘trope’ (p. 42) are represented by Manning
as enabling meaningful comparisons between past and present, and between
Britain and its transatlantic other, converting the attendant anachronisms and
contingencies into occasions of new insight into British and American
literature of the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries.
The concern with Scottish Enlightenment theories of rhetoric and with
‘character’ as an eighteenth-century figure for the conjunction of print and
personal identity also features in this year’s journal articles. Scottish
contributions to the New Rhetoric receive further elucidation in a compelling
essay by Catherine Packham, ‘Cicero’s Ears, or Eloquence in the Age of
Politeness: Oratory, Moderation, and the Sublime in Enlightenment Scotland’
(ECS 46[2013] 499–512). Starting with the ‘confrontation . . . between [rhetorical] mediocrity and [sublime] excess’ (p. 501) in Hume’s 1742 essay ‘Of
Eloquence’, Packham focuses on eighteenth-century ‘Scottish Ciceronianism’
(pp. 502–3) to identify recurring tensions within discussions of the uses and
potential dangers of rhetoric in the management and moderation of human
passions and manners in modern commercial, ‘polite’ society. If we turn to
‘character’, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, arguably
exerted an even stronger influence on eighteenth-century understandings of the
concept than did Scottish successors like Francis Hutcheson. In ‘ ‘‘Voice and
Accents’’: Enthusiastic Characterization in Shaftesbury’s The Moralists’
(ECLife 37[2013] 72–96), Shayda Hoover turns to the perennially intriguing
ambiguities of Shaftesbury’s various descriptions of the exemplary philosopher, and examines his carefully qualified accounts of enthusiasm to argue
that, right across the Characteristics, his conception of ‘the ‘‘character’’ of the
enthusiast . . . is a philosophical role, a style of utterance’ (pp. 91–2), in which
‘somatic elements’ (p. 83) are displaced or at least secondary.
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Manning’s transatlantic focus also aligns her work with a series of studies
that cross borders to elucidate the forms and terms of cultural exchange or
correspondence. These include a 2012 essay collection missed in last year’s
review, Regan, ed., Reading 1759: Literary Culture in Mid-Eighteenth-Century
Britain and France, which narrows the range of focus down to a single, albeit
historically pivotal, year. The editor, Shaun Regan, contributes both an
introduction and a conclusion, which help to frame chapters on a diverse array
of topics investigating ‘the literary culture of France and Britain’ (p. 2) during
a year that, alongside decisive military engagements across the globe, saw the
publication of major works including Candide, Rasselas, the first two volumes
of Tristram Shandy, Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition, and Smith’s
The Theory of Moral Sentiments. These well-known titles dominate the essays
that follow, but less familiar texts also feature, and by including essays on
French works among scholarship on English publications the collection
invokes a wider, transnational contextual horizon that subtly suggests new
perspectives on the English literary canon. James Watt reads Rasselas in the
light of the global ventures and engagements of the Seven Years War,
exploring Johnson’s reflections on the difficulty of finding a suitable point
of vantage for philosophical reflection. Global war is also the context for
Simon Davies’s discussion of Candide, which correlates different topics in the
novel—global war, slavery, and leadership—with Voltaire’s sense of his work’s
potential to influence public opinion and official policy. Nigel Wood writes on
‘Spectatorship, Duty, and Social Improvement’ in the first, 1759, edition of
The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and discusses the implications of the
revisions made for later editions in the context of ongoing debates about social
order and regulation, especially as found in the writings of Hume and Kames.
Mary Peace turns to ‘lives’ of penitent prostitutes and famous courtesans that
appeared in the crucial year, considering them in the context of contemporary
configurations of classical Roman anxieties concerning the social effects of
luxury, and arguing that these narratives ‘all, to a greater or lesser extent, work
to contain these anxieties through a recuperation of the prostitute as a
sentimental figure’ (p. 76).
A section on ‘Authorship and Aesthetics’ includes Adam Rounce’s valuable
essay on ‘Young, Goldsmith, Johnson, and the Idea of the Author in 1759’,
most usefully read alongside his monograph on literary Fame and Failure
(see below); Rosalind Powell focuses on a fragment of Smart’s Jubilate Agno
written in 1759, turning to Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry to elucidate the detail
of Smart’s challenge to existing, conventional understandings of the sublime.
Rebecca Ford’s informative essay concentrates on the eclipse of a text rather
than its creation, as she explores the conditions and ramifications of the
official condemnation of the Encyclope´die. Rasselas reappears in James Ward’s
contribution, which reads its ‘separate but overlapping relationship’ (p. 162)
with Hume’s theories of causation, drawing attention to the ways in which
the novel’s many conversations ‘assert the role of individual perception in
constructing narratives of cause and effect’ (p. 154). The penultimate section,
on ‘Originality and Appropriation’, offers further insights into the ways
in which texts might relate to each other or to a tradition. Moyra Haslett
traces the links, lexical and conceptual, between eccentricity and deviation as
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manifested in Tristram Shandy, while Kate Rumbold examines the numerous
quotations from and references to Shakespeare in Sarah Fielding’s The History
of the Countess of Dellwyn as representing a form of authorial selfconstruction, and uses the 1759 focus to draw out links between the novel
and contemporary literary-philosophical works and trends. Finally, Regan
closes the collection with an essay on ‘Writers, Reviewers, and the Culture of
Reading’, which takes a wider view and thereby helps to paint, in broader
strokes but with plenty of detailed reference to primary sources, the literary
and cultural context of the works discussed in foregoing chapters.
Connections between cultures and nations are likewise the topic of
Alexander Broadie’s book, Agreeable Connexions, which charts some of the
most significant overlaps between French and Scottish philosophers of the
eighteenth century. Chapters on different ‘connexions’ are organized chronologically, so that the book runs from the pre-1700 impact of Port Royal
thinkers on Scottish philosophy through four chapters, each of which
addresses the mutual exchange of ideas between a pair of Scottish and
French philosophers: Hume and Huet, unlikely partners, have points of
agreement on scepticism; Reid and Jouffroy on common sense; Adam Smith
and Sophie de Grouchy on sympathy; and Montesquieu and Ferguson on
republicanism. Reading, discussing, and in some cases translating each other’s
works, these figures are connected by philosophical concerns which, as the
author argues, militate against narrowly national scholarship of
Enlightenment culture.
The multiplicity of exchanges and modes of exchange in which these
particular pairings participate comes still more clearly into view in the essays
collected in Andries et al., eds., Intellectual Journeys: The Translation of Ideas
in Enlightenment England, France and Ireland. The semantic suggestiveness of
‘translation’ here functions as a prompt to some intriguing engagements with
national and international cultural phenomena; the following summary lists
only those contributions not concerned with poetry, novels, or drama. The
essays in Part I more or less take ‘translation’ as in the narrowest sense, as the
rendering of texts from one language into another. Samuel Baudry surveys
the theories of translation that circulated in Britain and Ireland in the decades
after Dryden’s famous prefatory remarks to his Aeneid; Garry Headland
focuses on the Irish ‘dramatist, essayist, imitator and translator of Tacitus’
(p. 35), Arthur Murphy, whose justifications and practices of imitation,
adaptation, and appropriation, Headland argues, need to be reassessed in the
context of contemporary practice. Another relatively unknown Irish author
and prolific translator, Thomas Nugent, stars in Séan Patrick Donlan’s
contribution, which pieces together the few extant biographical details and
describes the impressive body of publications authored by Nugent, from his
popular Grand Tour [1749] to his 1752 English translation of Montesquieu’s
De l’esprit des lois, along with anonymously published works of less certain
attribution. Part II, ‘Art and Literature’, is concerned with adaptations
between different genres and media, for instance from novel to stage; with
texts that advertise (sometimes falsely) foreign origins, as in Lise Andries’s
careful study of the cross-pollinations of ‘faits divers criminels’ in England and
France, in which she traces a network of citations and translations between
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publications (especially biographies and periodicals) on both sides of the
Channel; or between artists of different countries.
Part III, ‘The Circulation of Knowledge’, opens with a detailed and lively
essay by Ann Thomson that reconstructs the various modes and routes by
which the ideas of three Irishmen of very different political and religious
complexions, John Toland, Jonathan Swift, and the scholar and non-juror
Henry Dodwell, were circulated among French authors and scholars,
ultimately becoming linked as perceived propagators of ‘irreligious’ ideas
associated with the ‘radical Enlightenment’. The variety of ‘translations’ by
which these authors became known to French authors, and the bizarre
grouping that resulted, Thomson argues, serve as a warning to those who
would understand the circulation of ideas in eighteenth-century Europe as
uniform or direct. Darach Sanfey writes on ‘Montesquieu and the Irish’,
recording instances in which the Frenchman’s ideas travelled to Ireland, and
describing his relationship with a number of émigré Irishmen who served as his
‘tutors, secretaries, servants, confessors’ and translators—‘cultural intermediaries’ who would have given Montesquieu a unique perspective on English and
Irish culture (p. 177). Máire Kennedy’s article on ‘Irish booksellers and the
movement of ideas in the eighteenth century’ presents examples of international contacts and imports by Dublin booksellers to argue significant Irish
participation in European intellectual networks. Sarah Easterby-Smith is
concerned with ‘the circulation of plants, people and botanical culture between
France and Britain’ in the second half of the century (p. 215), carefully
assessing the implications of a single letter so as to trace a network of
connections between botanists and collectors. Lastly, in Part IV on ‘the press’,
Alexis Lévrier assesses the modes of imitation, mediation, and innovation
employed in a series of early French-language avatars of The Spectator, which
were produced by the Dutch journalist Justus Van Effen, and Anne-Marie
Mercier tracks Anglo-French cultural exchanges via analyses of the national
stereotypes found in a French journal of the 1770s and 1780s, L’Esprit des
journaux. The latter publication reappears in Muriel Collart and Daniel
Droixhe’s essay as evidence for the nationally inflected balance of credulity
and scepticism in mid- to late-century journal accounts of Patagonian giants.
Allison Neill-Rabaux details the editorial policy, content, and readership of
the mid-century Dublin periodical A Literary Journal, edited by a Protestant
Frenchman, Jean-Pierre Droz, which served as a ‘forum’ for exchange and
debate of Enlightenment ideas via its synopses of foreign and English-language
publications on topics such as history, theology, and science. Finally, Vladislav
Rjeoutski describes a Moscow periodical, the Journal des Sciences et des Arts
[1761], which similarly triangulated British, French, and Russian cultural
influence by means of synopses of book publications.
These various translations, exchanges, and border crossings speak to the
Enlightenment concept of the ‘cosmopolite’, the formation and modern
afterlife of which is discussed in Mary Helen McMurran, ‘The New
Cosmopolitanism and the Eighteenth Century’ (ECS 47[2013] 19–38). In her
essay she points out that the term is most frequently used in the context of
‘[d]isidentification’ (p. 30) and should therefore be handled with due caution in
discussions of what, following Martha Nussbaum’s 1994 essay ‘Patriotism and
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Cosmopolitanism’, has become known as ‘the New Cosmopolitanism’. Two
further 2013 titles, which were unavailable from the publishers or did not
arrive in time for review, address aspects of eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism: Michael Griffin, Enlightenment in Ruins: the Geographies of Oliver
Goldsmith and Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins, A Taste for China: English
Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism. Ivonne de Valle takes a
similarly global view in ‘From José de Acosta to the Enlightenment:
Barbarians, Climate Change, and (Colonial) Technology at the End of
History’ (ECent 54[2013] 435–59), tracing modern failures to adapt to
environmental variety back to the unitary understanding of ‘civilization’
developed by the sixteenth-century Spanish writer José de Acosta and by
French and British Enlightenment thinkers like Condorcet and Smith.
Another problematic variety of Enlightenment-era exchange is discussed in
Swaminathan and Beach, eds., Invoking Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British
Imagination, a collection of articles which sets out to recover the complex and
various ways in which eighteenth-century Britons thought and above all wrote
about slavery, revealing in the process the extent to which texts of this period
place slavery in other contexts than those which modern scholars might expect:
that of British subjects’ formulations of political or personal liberty; that of
Islamic courts, where a Christian might be a slave, and a slave a caliph; that of the
phenomenon of indentured servitude, whether in the West Indian colonies or in
Britain; or that of the increasing instability of late eighteenth-century labour
markets. As editors Srividhya Swaminathan and Adam R. Beach explain in their
lucid introduction, discourses of slavery and captivity permeated every kind of
discourse, and could be used to deplore the enslavement, literal or figurative, of
Britons, while simultaneously relativizing or minimizing the sufferings of
enslaved sub-Saharan Africans on Caribbean plantations. Thus Amy
Witherbee’s excellent article reveals how the peculiarly ambiguous status of
slaves in Muslim courts, and of their fictional, Europeanized counterparts in the
Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, was particularly suggestive for Europeans
striving to figure absolutist power relations or the pseudo-agency of goods in
commercial circulation. Laura Martin analyses the mutations of Inkle and
Yarico, a tale of ‘noble savagery’ and European perfidy that first appears in
Richard Ligon’s A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes [1675] and
which, when reproduced in numerous eighteenth-century narratives, poems, and
performances, would be shorn of the adjacent account of the close social contacts
and hardships shared between slaves and servants on the island. Roxann Wheeler
takes a lexicographic focus, tracing the usages of ‘slave’ and its cognates through
the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, drawing on a range of textual
evidence to elucidate the socio-economic contexts that inform English usage,
from the translation of ‘slave’ into a verb in the Renaissance to the appearance of
the ‘Slavey’ in popular writing of the late eighteenth century. Those interested in
eighteenth-century representations of slavery should also read Beach’s article
‘African Slaves, English Slave Narratives, and Early Modern Morocco’ (ECS
46[2013] 333–48), which develops the thesis he outlines as co-editor of Invoking
Slavery with reference to the creation of racial divisions among slaves under the
Moroccan ruler Mawlay Isma’il (1672–1727) as described in the autobiographical slave narratives of two Englishmen and ex-slaves: Francis Brooks’s
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Barbarian Cruelty [1692] and Thomas Pellow’s The History of the Long Captivity
and Adventures of Thomas Pellow [1739].
Translation and exchange are of course related to sociability and conversation.
The reciprocity and social composition of character and identity (whether private
or national) as described by Mannings and Broadie, and evident also in the
scholarship on slavery in literature and the ‘travels’ of Andries’ collection,
corresponds interestingly with the more metropolitan transactions in affect
detailed by Emrys D. Jones in Friendship and Allegiance in Eighteenth-Century
Literature: The Politics of Private Virtue in the Age of Walpole. The monograph
describes the many kinds and contexts of ‘friendly language’ (p. 2) in social and
political discourse during the years of Walpole’s ascendancy, and draws on a rich
stock of primary sources to exemplify the instability and ambiguity of terms
which were applied to relationships both private and public, genial and
mercenary. This in turn allows the author to complicate existing accounts of
political allegiance and ‘the relationship between writer and party under Walpole’
(p. 3), and to argue convincingly that ‘No one political group had complete
control over how the concept [of friendship] was represented, viewed or invoked
for polemical purposes’ (p. 12). Part I, ‘Friendship in Crisis’, offers a series of case
studies of ‘very specific’ articulations of relationship in the midst of political crisis
(the South Sea and excise crises, and the rise and fall of the Patriot movement) to
‘demonstrate . . . how the ambivalence of friendship’s conceptualization might
spring from historical events and political alignments’ (p. 12). Part II, ‘Friendship
by Trope’, is devoted to textual analysis of friendship tropes in literature of the
period, with a chapter each on the fable tradition—the section on Gay’s Fables is
a particular highlight—and the convention of comparing politicians to criminals,
which together take the study more firmly into the realm of literary scholarship
and make a compelling case for the pervasive influence of ‘political’ usages of
‘friendship’ upon its representation in other modes of discourse.
Where Jones’s study is deliberately focused on male friendship (see pp. 13–16),
in Bluestockings Displayed: Portraiture, Performance and Patronage, 1730–1830,
edited by Elizabeth Eger, female sociability takes precedence. An impressive
roster of academics from various disciplines contribute brief, scholarly essays
that explore the various modes of self-representation and influence of eighteenthcentury bluestockings. Eger notes in her introduction that ‘the original
bluestockings inhabited a world in which intellectual women could shine and
even dazzle’, and this collection, focusing on ‘the visual and material culture
surrounding the bluestocking project’ brings that brilliance to bear on our
understanding of female self-fashioning among Britain’s cultural elite (p. 1).
While several of the essays fall outside of the scope of this review, covering later
bluestocking society of the 1790s or genres such as drama and poetry, there is
much to interest students of the early to mid-eighteenth century. As one would
expect, Elizabeth Montagu, ‘Queen of the Bluestockings’, makes repeat
appearances. An essay by Clare Barlow explicates the iconography of
bluestocking portraiture with reference to paintings of Montagu and Elizabeth
Carter; Markman Ellis presents Montagu’s epistolary networks; Clarissa
Campbell Orr ‘looks back to the Patriot opposition to George II for the roots
of Montagu’s career’ (p. 233); and Devoney Looser notes the longevity of many
important bluestockings, including Montagu, and asks ‘how living to old age
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influence[d]’ their public image (p. 100). Arts other than portraiture and
literature are also represented: Alison Yarrington details the career and work of
Anne Seymour Damer, ‘a sculptor of ‘‘republican perfection’’ ’ (p. 81), while
Joseph Roach and Susan Staves turn to music and examine, respectively, the
voice of Eliza Sheridan, née Elizabeth Linley, and the complex status of learned
female sopranos in bluestocking circles.
These essays could usefully be read alongside Melanie Bigold’s fine study of
the shifting, overlapping realms of manuscript and print culture among women
writers of the mid-eighteenth century. Her Women of Letters: Manuscript
Afterlives in the Eighteenth Century takes as its premise that recent scholarship’s
focus on eighteenth-century print has done a disservice to the manuscript
culture that continued to flourish alongside it, particularly in the case of female
authors, whose writings were particularly likely to circulate in manuscript form
before or instead of being published in print. The study accordingly seeks to
redress the balance by considering ‘the similarities, differences, and successive
innovations in the manuscript and print careers of three ‘‘exemplary’’ female
writers’ (p. xii) of the period: Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Catharine Cockburn, and
Elizabeth Carter. Another major aim of the book, however, is to reassess the
aesthetic value of works which have yet to receive their due from critics, partly
because the genres in which they are written (the familiar letter, the memoir) are
often viewed as marginal to the literary canon. That women writers in this
period were invariably unwilling to commit themselves to publication is now
widely regarded as a misleading generalization; this detailed account of the
complex realities behind the conventional anonymity and modesty of
eighteenth-century women’s print authorship should offer a useful map for
scholars charting the careers of other writers of the period.
The significance of epistolary correspondence is explored in somewhat
different contexts in this year’s volume of Springer’s International Archives of
the History of Ideas: Dunan-Page and Prunier, eds., Debating the Faith:
Religion and Letter Writing in Great Britain, 1550–1800. Among those chapters
that deal with eighteenth-century materials, Sarah Hutton’s is the most closely
related to Bigold’s project in that she focuses on the manuscript correspondence of an early eighteenth-century woman writer, Damaris Masham, who
also published (anonymously) two books on philosophical topics. Masham’s
correspondence with John Locke is particularly interesting and, as Hutton
demonstrates, offers compelling evidence for her keen awareness of religious
controversy and debate. Anne Dunan-Page draws attention to hitherto
overlooked letters and manuscript records of an early eighteenth-century
Baptist congregation based in Cripplegate, tracking the letters to and from
their pastor from 1703, David Crosley, in ‘one of the best-documented’
Church scandals of the time (p. 85), as his ‘immodesty’ put increasing strains
on his relationship with the congregation. Daniel Szechi describes the role of
letters and other forms of private communication in the ‘parallel world’ of the
early eighteenth-century Jacobite underground (p. 107), analysing the channels
employed by the exiled Stuarts to communicate with their followers and
manage public opinion. Catholicism at home is the topic of Clothilde Prunier’s
essay, which examines the epistolary correspondence of the Masters of the
Scalan seminary in eastern Scotland with particular reference to their several
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self-reflexive references to the possibilities and purposes of letter-writing as
‘written conversation’ (p. 133). Remaining in Scotland, ‘Evangelical Calvinists
Versus the Hutcheson Circle: Debating the Faith in Scotland, 1738–1739’ by
James Moore presents a little-studied philosophical controversy which
suggests the extent to which members of the community of Enlightenment
writers, scholars, and ministers centred on Glasgow were prepared to challenge
Calvinist orthodoxy.
Letters may be marginal to today’s literary canon, but they are arguably
somewhat easier to characterise than that nebulous literary category, satire.
Even if one agrees with David Nokes that satire is a mode and not a genre, it is
undeniably a major eighteenth-century literary phenomenon; yet there have
been relatively few substantial studies dedicated to it. Ashley Marshall’s wideranging and historiographically rigorous The Practice of Satire in England,
1658–1770 is therefore a welcome addition to the field. Avowedly responding
to ‘a simple question: how was satire conceived by writers and readers ca.
1658–1770?’ (p. xi), the study also takes on the challenge of an extended
literary canon and offers a comprehensive overview of existing scholarship and
the kinds of eighteenth-century publications that might be classed under
satire’s capacious rubric. Furthermore, by thinking through the problematic
indefiniteness of ‘satire’ in chapters 1 and 2, on ‘Definitions, Aims, and
Method’ (with a useful table of modern scholarship on satire) and
‘Contemporary Views on Satire, 1658–1770’, and by widening the scope of
enquiry to take in the mass of minor satirical writings out of which such
colossi as Dryden, Swift, Fielding, and Johnson rose to prominence, Marshall
also engages with current debates concerning the place of a traditional literary
canon in modern scholarship, the importance of economic history to literary
history, and the viability or otherwise of grand historical narratives.
Eschewing the patrilineal ‘inheritance’ model of satire—although the vast
majority of the texts discussed are nonetheless by male authors—each of
chapters 3 to 7 follows chronological order and sets canonical satirists like
Defoe or Churchill in the context of a ‘massive and variegated body of writing’
(p. 1); the extensive bibliography of primary sources (pp. 355–92) offers an
invitation to further scholarship on the topic.
Drawing together contemporary and eighteenth-century sources, Erin
Goss’s Revealing Bodies: Anatomy, Allegory, and the Grounds of Knowledge
in the Long Eighteenth Century represents an important contribution to recent
thinking about the eighteenth-century body in literature. Goss explores the
scientific and literary discourses that mediate human knowledge and experience of the body, with particular attention to the tensions between generality
and particularity, externality and internality, that are registered by the
pronouns distinguishing ‘the Body’ from ‘this body’ or ‘my body’. It is this
determination to read past and present together that constitutes the book’s
major strength, as it takes recent theories and representations of the body as
a starting point for historical enquiry, and registers the formative and
persistent influence of eighteenth-century allegories of the generalized,
normative ‘Body’ on modern understandings. The upshot is a study which
offers a compelling argument for the value of returning to the past—to early
modern medical textbooks and treatises, to the aesthetics of Burke, and the
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poetry of Blake and Tighe—to reveal underlying patterns and assumptions in
present-day culture.
In Representing Humanity in the Age of Enlightenment, Alexander Cook,
Ned Curthoys, and Shino Konishi assemble thirteen engaging essays that, as
the editors point out in their introduction, balance competing senses of
‘representation’—‘to depict’ and to ‘speak for’—and prompt us to understand
‘humanity’ ‘not as a shared intellectual supposition . . . but as a field of conflict
in which competing visions of human life and political organization were
mobilized’ (p. 3). Of those thirteen, two are germane to the present review.
John Docker’s essay asks how Enlightenment historical writing ‘negotiated
conflicting interpretations’ of Islam and the medieval Arab world (p. 41),
looking to the critical accounts of the Crusades in Hume, Robertson, and
Gibbon, in which Eurocentric narratives of secularization are pitted against an
‘ex-centric’ curiosity that allows them to entertain the unknown and
unfamiliar, ‘disorient Europe’ (p. 44), and challenge contemporary understandings of human nature. Kate Fullagar examines the tensions between
universality and individuality in the art theory of Joshua Reynolds, with his
insistence that painting should depict ‘general’ men (p. 97) glaringly at odds
with the portraitist’s practical, economic need to distinguish between sitters,
necessitating some caveats which have particularly interesting implications for
his portraits of ‘New World representatives’ (p. 108).
Recent years have seen a number of important publications on the history of
melancholy in the long eighteenth century; Jane Darcy’s Melancholy and
Literary Biography, 1640–1816 likewise speaks to our modern fascination with
the sable humour, approaching the topic not only via contemporary medical
theories, but by identifying the influence of these on contemporary literary
biography, which, Darcy argues, becomes increasingly concerned with the
conjunction of literary genius and melancholic suffering. Her book may thus
be read both as a study of literary representations of melancholy in the long
eighteenth century and as a valuable account of changes in the aims and
conventions of literary biography during the same period. Later chapters shift
to Romantic literary biography, but the first three are dominated, quite
properly so, by the figure of Samuel Johnson. The opening chapter offers a
finely judged reading of the seventeenth-century literary lives from Walton’s
Donne to Sprat’s Cowley which were to provide Johnson with valuable points
of reference for understanding the conjunction of melancholy and literature,
after which two chapters collect and assess the numerous interconnections
between the themes of melancholy and authorship in Johnson’s writings, and
the points of contact between the autobiographical and biographical writings
of Johnson’s most ardent admirer, Boswell, and medical practitioner and
theorist George Cheyne’s The English Malady.
Medical theory and Boswell’s mind–body imaginary also feature in
Zigarovich, ed., Sex and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature. The
collection covers all the major genres and amply demonstrates the argument
made by contributing editor Jolene Zigarovich that the period is one of
‘increasing preoccupation with mortality and the corpse’ and a ‘concomitant
eroticization of death’ (p. 1). The contributions also offer a variety of examples
from different decades to underwrite her claim for an ‘emerging sex-death
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dialectic’ (p. 4), many employing ‘Lacanian, Marxist, Freudian, Foucauldian,
Kristevan’ ideas to theorize emerging understandings of sexuality and
morality. The majority are devoted to novels, poetry and drama; in addition,
an essay by Marcia Nichols reads attitudes to the female body and female
sexuality out of the images and texts of early eighteenth-century medical
anatomists and illustrators, identifying their use of a bawdy lexis common to
pornography, belles-lettres, and art criticism. James Boswell’s excited account
in The Hypochondriack of a machine for temporarily freezing living creatures
provides the starting point for Katherine Ellison’s exploration of the
‘experiments with a rhetoric of cold’ to be found throughout his writings,
which allow him to imaginatively control and manipulate physical sensation in
the medium of print (p. 195); and Ian McCormick discusses eighteenth-century
representations of ‘homosexuality and masturbation as morbid, secret, and
unproductive crimes’ in relation to their punishment by death (p. 269).
Stephen Bending’s Green Retreats: Women, Gardens, and EighteenthCentury Culture contributes to both the history of women’s writing and that
of landscape and gardening. Drawing together a wealth of primary sources
that document the place of women in gardens, the book argues convincingly
that eighteenth-century women’s creation of and experiences in gardens were
at once enabled and constricted by the cultural tropes and narratives available
in the period. After an introduction that surveys the broader history of
British gardening in relation to women, two chapters on the twin tropes of
retirement and disgrace track the traditions, images, and ideas that governed
eighteenth-century (self-)representations of women in gardens, bringing
together literary sources and first-hand testimonies in order to explore ‘the
elisions and contradictions . . . central to eighteenth-century understandings
and experiences of retired life’ (p. 43), and the gendering of those understandings. The remainder of the book sets abstract figuration against lived
experience in four absorbing case studies of eighteenth-century women and
their experiences of and contributions to particular landscape gardens:
Elizabeth Montagu at Sandleford, Lady Mary Coke at Notting Hill, Lady
Caroline Holland at the nearby Holland Park, and Henrietta Knight at
Barrells Hall.
In Representing Place in British Literature and Culture, 1660–1830, also
covered in Chapter XI, and, briefly, in Section 3 below, Evan Gottlieb and
Juliet Shields collect essays on genres, movements, and authors concerned with
representing place, from geographical specificity in Restoration drama to the
local poetries of the English Midlands and Scottish Lowlands through the
mid- and late eighteenth century. ‘Rather than embracing a single and
inevitably limiting theoretical framework for discussing the formation of local,
national, and trans-national identities’, the editors instead argue in their
introduction that ‘the long eighteenth century saw the development of a
number of discourses, practices, and genres that allowed people to think about
place, community, and identity in new ways’ (p. 3). Cian Duffy’s The
Landscapes of the Sublime, 1700–1830: Classic Ground ‘traces the beginnings of
our extraordinary cultural investment in the ‘natural sublime’ across a diverse
range of areas of enquiry and genres of writing eighteenth-century and
Romantic-period Europe’ (p. 2) Drawing on earlier scholarship on the topic, a
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central pillar of Duffy’s argument is that the ‘encounter with ‘‘the natural
sublime’’ in the cultural history of the eighteenth century and Romantic
period . . . was quintessentially interested’ (p. 8), and sited in ‘spaces whose
cultural values were already highly determined . . . inscribed with a rich layer of
historical and cultural associations’ (p. 9). Primary sources are therefore
chosen for their contemporary significance and addressed in chapters devoted
to different locations and phenomena around which the eighteenth-century
and Romantic discourses of the sublime developed. The two opening chapters
fall largely within the scope of this review, considering the mid-century
scientific and travel narratives that established the terms on which later
explorers, tourists, and writers encountered these scenes. For discussion of
later chapters, see the coverage in Chapter XI.
Histories of print culture constitute another important focus for eighteenthcentury scholarship in 2013. Most substantial is Fame and Failure, 1700–1820:
The Unfulfilled Literary Life (also discussed in Section 3 below), in which
Adam Rounce outlines an intriguing alternative history of eighteenth-century
authorship by focusing on the extremes of authorial achievement, fame, and
(especially) its apparent opposite, failure, as experiences that can illuminate for
us the dynamics of literary production in the period, and its relationship to the
writing individual. Chapters organized around particular authors chart ‘the
inefficacy of apparent literary success, and the forms of vanity and folly often
found in failed authorship’ (p. 2) as they manifest themselves in the changing
landscapes of eighteenth-century print culture. Samuel Johnson’s lifelong
fascination with the vagaries of fame led him to record the lives of failed
authors like Richard Savage and Sir Richard Blackmore, and to develop a
model of literary endeavour that could register the differing ‘aesthetics of
failure’ (p. 3) implicit in Savage’s grandiose complaints or in Blackmore’s
dignified retreats. It is therefore appropriate that Johnson reappears
throughout the book, from chapter 1, which details Savage’s deluded (yet in
some respects inspired) courting of fame and failure, to a discussion of the
living failure and posthumous fame of the hack writer William Dodd in
chapter 2, Anna Seward’s struggles to achieve the kind of literary prominence
she desired, in chapter 3, and Sir Percival Stockdale’s doggedly repeated, failed
attempts at recognition, in chapter 4. After turning directly to Johnson as
exemplary of the narrow boundary existing between literary success and its
opposite, these authors’ private psychodramas and their relation to broader
narratives of literary vocation are extended in the final chapter into the
Romantic era with Thomas Chatterton’s abortive career and its extended
literary afterlife.
David A. Brewer’s interesting essay ‘The Tactility of Authorial Names’
(ECent 54[2013] 193–213) considers mid-eighteenth-century understandings
and constructions of authorship from a rather different perspective, examining
a selection of hand-signed novels as evidence for the development of ‘the
author’ as a special ontological category (see also Section 2 below). These
examples, he argues, reveal the extent to which authorship at mid-century was
understood by both audiences and those who wrote for them as a construction
or ‘assemblage’ that ‘amounts to a kind of personhood’ quite distinct from
humanity (p. 196). Brewer’s article is one of several contributions to a special
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issue of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation on ‘Subject Theory
and the Sensational Subject’, introduced by Manushag N. Powell (ECent
54[2013] 147–51); in the same issue, Noelle Chao’s ‘Listening to the Voice
on the Page: Joshua Steele and Technologies of Recording’ (ECent 54[2013]
245–61) reads the history of print in relation to sound rather than touch, and
sets Steele’s attempts to find an effective print notation for speech in the
context of mid-century elocution and pronunciation manuals. Thus ‘Steele’s
method encourages the twenty-first-century critic to lend an attentive ear to
the eighteenth-century text’ (p. 247).
Literary scholars are also becoming increasingly attentive to the ways in
which economic and legal history impinge on their subject. Trevor Ross’s
persuasive article on ‘The Fate of Style in an Age of Intellectual Property’
(ELH 80[2013] 747–82) offers evidence for the value of such awareness, with a
careful assessment of existing scholarship on the 1774 decision to uphold
statutory limits on copyright that segues into a fascinating discussion of the
changes to the print market through the eighteenth century and the relation of
copyright law to the development of modern understandings of literary style.
Ross points out the interconnections between the law’s formulations of the
relative importance of ideas (content) versus style (form) in decisions regarding
ownership, and the gradual shift from traditional rhetorical understandings of
decorum through New Rhetorical redefinitions of style. The nineteenth and
twentieth centuries see the ramifications of legal disinterest in style with the
development of critical understandings of style as a component relevant solely
(albeit crucially) in the specialized arena of ‘literature’, in which it comes to be
understood as the defining mark of literary originality.
The most prominent instance of work by eighteenth-century scholars that
reflects on methodology, disciplinary practice, and current trends may be
found in the spring 2013 issue of The Eighteenth Century, which opens with a
series of brief reflections on scholarly reading practices in eighteenth-century
studies. As Lisa A. Freeman explains in her introduction, these short but
suggestive pieces started life as an ASECS session responding to recent calls
for ‘surface’ reading to replace ‘suspicious’ reading. As the titles of their essays
suggest, each of Freeman’s four co-contributors—Emily Hodgson Anderson,
Suvir Kaul, Stuart Sherman, and Kristina Straub—resist at least some aspects
of either the binary opposition itself or the accounts of reading and historical
method that the terms imply, and use them rather as an occasion for
stimulating critical engagements with the various ways in which we have read,
are now reading, or have read our readings of, the eighteenth century.
Contributions: Lisa A. Freeman, ‘Why We Argue About the Way We Read:
An Introduction’ (ECent 54[2013] 121–4); Emily Hodgson Anderson, ‘Why
We Do (or Don’t) Argue About the Way We Read’ (ECent 54[2013] 125–8);
Suvir Kaul, ‘Reading, Constraint, and Freedom’ (ECent 54[2013] 129–32);
Stuart Sherman, ‘Pluralistic Predilections: Surface Reading as Not-AltogetherNew Resource’ (ECent 54[2013] 133–8; and Kristina Straub, ‘The Suspicious
Reader Surprised, or, What I Learned from ‘‘Surface Reading’’ ’ (ECent
54[2013] 139–43).
Turning to individual authors, in ‘Burke, Biomedicine, and Biobelligerence’
(ECent 54[2013] 231–43), Richard A. Barney offers a detailed anatomy of
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the metaphors of disease in the Reflections on the Revolution in France to argue
that Burke’s representation of the events in France and their relationship
to and potential impact on Britain relies on a complex ‘virtualization of
contagion and pathological development’, the logic of which in turn informs
in subtle yet important ways his call for a belligerent British response in
the Letters on a Regicide Peace. Matthew W. Binney’s article ‘Edmund Burke’s
Sublime Cosmopolitan Aesthetic’ (SEL 53[2013] 643–66) draws together some
of the themes already seen in this year’s eighteenth-century scholarship,
namely cosmopolitanism, sympathy, and the sublime. Binney presents a series
of close readings of A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of
the Sublime and Beautiful [1757], which understands the ‘cosmopolitan’ as
implying or figuring vast and complex human communities. Capitalizing on
the Enquiry’s intersections with Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments,
Binney identifies a series of passages which suggest that the former work
‘encourages an attachment to, awareness of, and commitments to not only
objects, but also cultures and communities’, and thus reveals how ‘the
subject can be empowered to act morally toward foreign and unfamiliar
peoples . . . through a profound sense of his or her limitations’ (p. 644).
The year 2013 was a good one for Defoe studies, with a substantial
monograph devoted to the author, Robert James Merrett’s Daniel Defoe:
Contrarian, and numerous journal articles addressing the novels and other
prose writings. While the majority of these are covered by Bonnie Latimer
in Section 2 below, a few items will be considered here instead. Two essays
address the denominational affiliations implicit in some of Defoe’s non-fiction.
Yannick Deschamps examines ‘Daniel Defoe’s Contribution to the Dispute
Over Occasional Conformity’ (ECS 46[2013] 349–61) between 1698 and
1705, challenging existing accounts of Defoe’s views on the subject as
paradoxical—both ‘hostile to the practice’ and ‘critical of the Occasional
Conformity Bill’ (p. 350)—in favour of a reading which traces developments
and changes in Defoe’s somewhat idiosyncratic understanding of Dissent and
traces the moment of transition from opposition to acceptance of occasional
conformity to his recruitment by Robert Harley in 1703. Notwithstanding the
ironies and ambiguities of many of Defoe’s pamphlets on the topic,
Deschamps thus insists on the ultimate legibility of the views they present.
This article should be read in conjunction with Julian Fung’s accomplished
analysis of the denominational affiliation of the narrator of Defoe’s Tour (SEL
53[2013] 565–82). Starting from the principle that ‘the narrator is an impostor’
(p. 566), and carefully adjusting existing accounts via detailed readings of
crucial passages, he convincingly identifies the narrator as a pro-Stuart
Anglican, making an entirely logical case for this characterization being a
strategy of rhetorical misdirection by which pro-Toleration views are made
palatable to non-Dissenters.
Jane Darcy’s Melancholy and Literary Biography, 1640–1816, and Adam
Rounce’s Fame and Failure 1720-1800, discussed above, contain important
chapters on Johnson. In addition, Ruth Mack, ‘The Limits of the Senses in
Johnson’s Scotland’ (ECent 54[2013] 279–94), proposes adjustments to existing
understandings of Johnson’s observational methodology in A Journey to the
Western Islands of Scotland [1775] by drawing attention to the work’s
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‘deliberate accounts of failed measurement’, which she argues must be
understood as reflecting not only Johnson’s investment in Baconian methodology but also his ‘epistemological self-consciousness’ (p. 287) and attendant
enquiry into the ‘conditions under which the outside observer may report on
a society not his own’ (p. 286). The relative size of things is likewise addressed
in Melinda Alliker Rabb’s ‘Johnson, Lilliput, and Eighteenth-Century
Miniature’ (ECS 46[2013] 281–98), which draws on Susan Stewart and other
theorists of the miniature to situate Johnson’s responses to the littleness of
Lilliput in the context of contemporary interest in miniaturization, and traces
developments in his responses to the miniature across his writing career,
closing with a consideration of the miniature objects he owned.
The year 2013 was a particularly good one for Richardson studies. The
Herculean labour of editing his extraordinarily voluminous correspondence
has borne fruit in the first two volumes of the Cambridge Edition of the
Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, covering his correspondence with the
poet and projector Aaron Hill, and the physicians George Cheyne and
Thomas Edwards; both volumes will be of interest not only to Richardson
specialists but to eighteenth-century scholars in general, illuminating the social
mores of the period and touching on topics as various as medical health,
poetry, and family relations. These titles are reviewed, along with other works
on Richardson, by Bonnie Latimer in Section 2, with the exception of her own
monograph, Making Gender, Culture, and the Self in the Fiction of Samuel
Richardson: The Novel Individual, which will be reviewed here. Monographs on
Richardson have been few and far between in recent decades; rarer still are
extended considerations of his final novel, Sir Charles Grandison. Latimer’s
study, which argues persuasively that this novel should be understood as
‘Richardson’s capping statement on his own achievement’ (p. 2), asks how
‘Richardson’s canon—and perhaps even the mid-century novel—look different when viewed through the lens of Grandison’ (p. 3). This approach not only
allows a reconsideration the novel’s literary value, its subtle parody and
complex characterizations, but also draws attention to Richardson’s role in
the eighteenth-century reimagining and reconceptualization of ‘the individual’,
of its relation to the community, and of its various intersections with
contemporary understandings of gender, ethics, marriage, and the family.
The five chapters consider the versions of individuality portrayed in the
novels—with an emphasis on Grandison as Richardson’s fullest and final
statement—in relation to different aspects of and contexts for eighteenthcentury understandings of selfhood: the perceived instability of female
consciousness; the commonplace correlation of mind with masculinity; the
moral economies implicit in contemporary narratives of female agency and
decision-making; legitimizations of deception and exemplary virtue in latitudinarian devotional literature; and the tensions between self and community in
understandings of marriage and motherhood. By insisting on Richardson’s
self-consciousness and skill as a novelist, and by crossing genre boundaries to
consider his novels alongside contemporary poetry, exemplary narratives, and
moral and philosophical treatises, the study reveals the sophistication and
cultural significance of Grandison’s moral universe and its moral individuals.
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This year saw the publication of several important titles relating to Jonathan
Swift. Journal to Stella: Letters to Esther Johnson and Rebecca Dingley, 1710–
1713, edited by Abigail Williams, and Parodies, Hoaxes and Mock Treatises:
Polite Conversations, Directions to Servants and Other Works, edited by Valerie
Rumbold, bring the current count of volumes in the Cambridge Edition of the
Works of Jonathan Swift to five. If editing Swift inevitably brings with it
particular textual challenges, these two collections grapple with further
complications. For Parodies, Hoaxes and Mock Treatises, the main editorial
concerns are the principle of inclusion and the problem of generic taxonomy.
As Rumbold suggests, such a capacious title might arguably take in the
majority of Swift’s published works. Furthermore, the afterlives of hoaxes
such as the Bickerstaff prediction, and the recurrence of themes in both hoaxes
and serious works, as in the writings on language use, recommend the
incorporation of texts by authors other than Swift or that fall outside the given
generic rubric. Rumbold’s approach tends towards inclusiveness, and the
volume is in effect a compendium of Swift’s shorter and miscellaneous works.
Thus, for instance, Polite Conversation and related titles are supplemented
by the serious A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the
English Tongue, and the published works definitely by Swift are followed
by ‘Associated Materials’ and ‘Appendices’, which contain unpublished
manuscript materials, works of uncertain authorship or written by other
authors, and reviews of the evidence for attribution. Like the other volumes in
the series the edition contributes to our understanding of prose genres in the
period, with an extensive general introduction that includes a careful analysis
of the interrelations between hoax, parody and mock-treatise. Still more
valuable is the ‘General Textual Introduction and Textual Accounts of
Individual Works’ at the end of the volume, which, again like the other
volumes in the series, assembles, summarizes and (in many cases) corrects or
supplements the mass of existing textual scholarship. Reproductions of
typographical and other peculiarities of the original editions lend further
vividness to these works which, to paraphrase Rumbold’s comment on Polite
Conversation, collectively ‘impres[s] as a monument to Swift’s extraordinarily
creative obsessions’ (p. 265). The miscellaneity of the materials in Rumbold’s
edition contrasts with the relatively self-evident pedigree and coherence of the
texts edited by Abigail Williams, which consist of the epistolary ‘journals’
written by Swift to Rebecca Dingley and Esther Johnson during his stay in
London between 1710 and 1713. Nonetheless, as a collection of private letters
not intended for publication during the author’s lifetime, and with a large
portion of the original manuscripts letters now lost and available only in
Deane Swift’s heavily ‘tidied’ posthumous print edition, Journal to Stella
likewise demands, and here receives, more than usually thoughtful editing.
Williams re-transcribes all the extant holograph letters, a challenge in itself
given the minute handwriting, densely filled pages, and liberal use of a private
‘little language’ (the latter is helpfully glossed in footnotes and an appendix).
In many cases these difficulties are compounded by obliterations of text, most
of which were apparently carried out by Swift himself, and one of the virtues
of the edition is that digital imaging techniques have been used to decipher
many previously illegible passages, which in turn allows Williams to suggest
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new hypotheses regarding the timing and purposes of the crossings out
(pp. lxxx–lxxxiv). Aside from the pleasure of reading Swift at his most intimate
and playful in a text that preserves, as far as possible, his numerous verbal and
graphic idiosyncrasies, another noteworthy attraction of the edition is
Appendix A, ‘Swift, Harley, St John and the Political Debates Behind the
Journal to Stella’ (pp. 543–58), which not only outlines the political context of
the letters but may stand alone as a detailed yet entirely lucid account of some
of the complex political manoeuvring in and around the court of Queen Anne
in the years covered by Swift’s letters.
Williams is one of several members of the Swift edition editorial team who
contribute to Paddy Bullard and James McLaverty’s Jonathan Swift and the
Eighteenth-Century Book, a stimulating collection which not only adds
substantially to our understanding of Swift’s absorbingly complicated dealings
with and attitudes to the world of eighteenth-century print, but equally may be
considered as a gathering of new essays ‘on the history of the book in the
eighteenth century’ (p. xi), and as such it offers new insights into that world,
into the different kinds of relation that could pertain among printers,
booksellers, and authors, the genres and forms in which new works appeared
before the public, and the ways in which eighteenth-century readers and
collectors acquired, used, and disposed of their books. The editors’ introduction surveys the London and Dublin book trades during the full span of
Swift’s career as author while offering plenty of intriguing details as evidence
for the layered complexity of Swift’s engagement with those trades. The
equally fine-grained essays that follow will only be briefly noted here: Part I,
‘Swift’s Books and Their Environments’, comprises Stephen Karian’s argument for Swift as a ‘manuscript poet’ whose verses were typically designed
for semi-private circulation rather than print publication; a considered
examination by Ian Gadd of the evidence behind Swift’s somewhat misleading
accounts of his relations with his publishers, particularly those with the
bookseller Benjamin Tooke Jr. and the printer John Barber during the early
part of his career (1701–14); and an account of some of the libraries and books
known, owned, described, or imagined by Swift, in which Paddy Bullard
assesses Swift’s views and practices of book use and ownership. In Part II,
‘Some Species of Swiftian Book’, Pat Rogers discusses the vexed question of
Swift’s relationship with Curll via an enquiry into the conventions and
characteristics of the miscellanies which served as ‘ ‘‘container’’ volumes’
(p. 88) for so many of Swift’s works; Marcus Walsh anatomizes the
bibliographical features—from marginalia and footnotes to title pages and
bibliographies—which are mocked in A Tale of a Tub; and Abigail Williams
surveys the varieties of manuscript and print afterlives of Swift’s letters and
the ways in which they ‘shaped his identity in the period immediately after
his death’ (p. 119). Shef Rogers reassesses the ‘bibliographical context’ of
Gulliver’s Travels, that is, its conditions of publication and its textual sources
and precedents, as a means of understanding how Swift ‘colonized’ earlier
travel writers ‘even as he fundamentally doubted the possibility of improvement from travel itself’ (p. 147). James McLaverty presents in detail various
stages in the life of George Faulkner’s The Works of J.S., from its inception as
a proposal to its drawn-out publication and reception, in order to elucidate
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Swift’s shifting and complicated responses to this planned posthumous
monument, and the degrees of liberty and constraint that characterized
Faulkner’s efforts. The essays in Part III situate Swift’s books within their
broader context (p. 177). Ian Higgins’s essay on ‘Censorship, Libel and
Self-Censorship’ deftly sets Swift’s scandalous satires in the context of
contemporary treason and libel laws. Swift’s posthumous life in print is the
focus of two chapters: Adam Rounce surveys ‘the role of dual publication
in Swift’s career’ (p. 200) with reference to Swift’s vacillating stances on
the publication of his works and the resulting complications for modern
historians, while Daniel Cook ‘charts the different methodologies employed by
those who sought to clean up [John] Hawkesworth’s edition’, namely Dean
Swift, John Nichols, and Walter Scott. Finally, the collection closes—quite
appropriately—with an engaging essay by Claude Rawson which looks even
further into Swift’s posthumous legacy by surveying the continuities and
transformations of the ‘mock-editorial phenomenon, in which works of
fiction . . . take the form of editions of themselves’ (p. 231) from Fielding and
Sterne to Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself [1959].
In Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World, Leopold Damrosch achieves the
rare feat of writing a carefully researched yet eminently accessible biography
of an author who has long proved difficult to pin down, not only due to
the multivocality and tonal ambiguities of his writings, but because little
documentation survives for some of the most important periods and
relationships of his life. Damrosch is openly curious about Swift’s personal
life and engagingly willing to propose theories and to wonder about
motivations, while always admitting the relevant degree of uncertainty. Fairminded collation of the mass of Swift scholarship, including materials from the
obscurer reaches of posthumous Swiftiana, permits Damrosch to present
informed speculations—even, in some cases, to ratify heretofore unconfirmed
claims—regarding such perennial uncertainties as the circumstances of
Swift’s birth and early years, his relationship with Esther Johnson, and the
reasons behind his continuing failure to gain the preferment he so desired.
This, combined with deft outlines of the social, religious, political, and cultural
contexts, produces an impressionistic yet satisfying sense of the intersections
in Swift’s life between the personal and the political, the world and the
writing. Damrosch’s biography could profitably be read alongside Ashley
Marshall’s critical survey and bibliography of Swift biographies in the 2013
issue of Swift Studies, ‘The Lives of Jonathan Swift’ (SStud 28[2013] 10–57).
The latter also includes the following essays: Lindsay Levy’s ‘ ‘‘The Kindness
of Mr Hartstonge’’: Matthew Weld Hartstonge’s Contribution to Walter
Scott’s Collection of Swiftiana’ (SStud 28[2013] 58–77), to which is appended a
useful ‘selective bibliography of Swift-related materials held at Abbotsford’
library (p. 66); a comparison by Paul Baines of the print presentation and
stylistic detail of Swift’s hoax The Last Speech . . . of Ebenezor Ellison and
its ‘genuine’ counterpart, The Last Farewell of Ebenezor Elliston, in ‘Swift’s
Last Speech and Dying Words of Ebenezor Elliston: Reading the Ephemeral
Text’ (SStud 28[2013] 78–95); a Straussian reading of Gulliver’s Travels by
Norbert Col, ‘Oblique Writing in Time of ‘‘Moderate’’ Persecution: The
Example of Gulliver’s Travels’ Swift’ (SStud 28[2013] 96–114); an account of
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Samuel Richardson’s publication of spurious Gulliveriana that complicates
his self-declared advocacy of authors’ rights in Nicholas Seager, ‘Samuel
Richardson and the Third Volume of Gulliver’s Travels’ (SStud 28[2013]
128–36); and Dieter Fuchs, ‘Homeric Intertextuality: Odysseus and the
Cyclops in Gulliver’s Travels’ (SStud 28[2013] 145–7), which unpicks the
implications of the Homeric allusion in the Lilliputians’ attack on Gulliver.
Another substantial entry in Swift scholarship this year is Juhas, Müller,
and Hansen, eds., ‘The First Wit of the Age’: Essays on Swift and his
Contemporaries in Honour of Hermann J. Real: twenty-five essays on a
plethora of subjects. The first two sections comprise a series of detailed
biographical and bibliographical studies: following an opening address by
Daniel Mulhall (Irish ambassador to Germany) on Swift and his Anglo-Irish
legacy, James Woolley sifts through the Berkeley Castle archives for evidence
of Swift’s relationship with Berkeley, filling in some of the gaps in current
knowledge and turning up a heretofore unpublished Swift letter; Ashley
Marshall continues the ongoing re-evaluation of the friendship between Swift
and Pope via careful readings of the epistolary exchanges attending the latter’s
dedication of the 1736 Dunciad; and analysis of the typesetting of early
editions of A Tale of the Tub leads James E. May to conclude that ‘authorized
revisions [were] inserted into many page-settings’, which ‘complicates the
selection’ of a copy-text (p. 108). John Irwin Fischer reviews the evidence for
Swift’s authorship of an early sermon, ‘The Difficulty of Knowing One’s Self’,
while Andrew Carpenter reconstructs the mid-eighteenth-century Dublin book
market so as to enliven and elucidate the circumstances attending the
publication of two early, competing Irish editions of Swift’s Works.
Part III of the book covers ‘Early Prose’: a compelling contribution by
Clement Hawes argues that the ‘notion of ‘‘modernity’’ ’ attacked in A Tale of a
Tub and other early prose works is ‘best understood in terms of the occultist
fantasies of omniscience and omnipotence that emerged as the not-quiteso-hidden underbelly of the early Royal Society’ (p. 138). Hugh OrmsbyLennon’s Joycean gallimaufry takes up themes from his recent monograph Hey
Presto! Swift and the Quacks [2012] to extrapolate compellingly from Swift’s
personas, etceteras, and paratexts in A Tale of the Tub, while Rudolf Freiburg
draws on the intellectual contexts of A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical
Operation of the Spirit to pin down some nuances of its critique of enthusiasm.
Part IV addresses Swift’s poetry, and is covered elsewhere. Part V is dedicated to
Gulliver’s Travels, with Allan Ingram contributing an essay on child-bearing and
-rearing in the Travels, and Ann Cline Kelly reading ‘The Abuse of Humankind
in Houyhnhnmland’ in the context of the attitudes to animals found in early
modern works such as More’s Utopia, James Howell’s The Party of Beasts, and
Giovanni Battista Gelli’s Circe. Part VI, on reception, includes studies of ‘Swift
among the Bluestockings’ (Mascha Hansen) and the ‘Political Dimension of
Shaftesbury’s Aversion to Swift’ (Patrick Müller); a survey of Japanese
translations and reimaginings of Swift’s works by Noriyuki Harada; and
Bernfried Nugel’s contribution to ongoing debates over Aldous Huxley’s
reading of Swift in his Varsity essay ‘Thule’. Parts VII and VIII are more varied
in topic. Heinz-Joachim Müllenbrock writes on party-political inflections of
economic discourse in early eighteenth-century England, drawing his evidence
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from the writings of Locke, Defoe, Mandeville, Ward, Pope, Gay, and Swift;
Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp surveys patriotic celebration and critique in
‘Eighteenth-Century Sea Drama’ (p. 351), with particular reference to the
nautical plays of Susanna Centlivre and Tobias Smollet; Howard Weinbrot
narrates the disturbing juridical aftermath of the Gordon Riots, namely the trials
of Lord George Gordon in 1786 and 1787. Marcus Walsh reflects on the fortunes
of ‘intentionality’ in Swift studies and on Hermann Real’s encouragement
to scholarship that employs ‘narrowly specified and appropriate knowledge’
in aid of ‘textual interpretation’ (p. 387); and W.B. Carnochan recalls his
experience of the first Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift in 1984.
In addition to the monographs, essay collections, and journals specifically
dedicated to his writings, Swift of course also appeared in stand-alone articles,
which span the spectrum from textual history to literary-theoretical analysis.
Erin Mackie, ‘Swift and Mimetic Sickness’ (ECent 54[2013] 359–73), usefully
invokes the anthropologist Michael Taussig’s account of the distinction
between Mimesis and Alterity to argue that the physical disorders that plague
the characters of Swift’s satires manifest his view of contemporary print
culture’s unhealthy ‘collapse [of the] distinctions between mind and matter,
between self and others, between copy and origin’ (p. 371). Kristin M. Girten,
‘Mingling with Matter: Tactile Microscopy and the Philosophic Mind in
Brobdingnag and Beyond’ (ECent 54[2013] 497–520), focuses on the conjunction of the visual and the tactile in New Scientific microscopy as a way of
understanding the detail of Swift’s critiques of science in Gulliver’s Travels.
On the topic of the history of microscopy during Swift’s lifetime, it is worth
noting Al Coppola’s ‘ ‘‘Without the Help of Glasses’’: The Anthropocentric
Spectacle of Nehemiah Grew’s Botany’ (ECent 54[2013] 263–77); although its
subject, Grew’s Anatomy of Plants [1682], falls outside of the scope of this
review, it does offer useful context for the ‘microscopic’ enthusiasms and
suspicions of later decades. In the same journal, Mary Carter’s ‘Swift and the
Scheme for Badging Beggars in Dublin, 1726–1737’ (ECLife 37[2013] 97–118)
traces the development of Swift’s attempts to promote the scheme, of which he
was ‘one of [the] most abiding supporters’ (p. 99), and sets the rather
unpalatable pieces he wrote to promote it in the context of existing policies and
proposals, and the endemic and extreme poverty in Dublin during the 1720s.
Turning finally to Walpole, James D. Lilley, ‘Studies in Uniquity: Horace
Walpole’s Singular Collection’ (ELH 80[2013] 93–124), elucidates the principles informing Horace Walpole’s eccentric yet principled collections,
publications, and constructions by investigating what Walpole, in a playful
letter to mid-century journal The Museum, celebrated as an object’s ‘uniquity’.
Walpole’s commitment to uniquity, argues Lilley, allows us to discover in
his collections and writings an ‘interrelational’ historical logic which may
be contrasted with that of the antiquarian, and which celebrates not the
certainty and completeness valued by historians like Hume or Gibbon, but
openness and contingence. Walpole’s resistance to histories that promote
narrative coherence over fine-grained historiography is also important to
Abby Coykendall’s excellent ‘Chance Enlightenments, Choice Superstitions:
Walpole’s Historic Doubts and Enlightenment Historicism’ (ECent 54[2013]
53–70). ‘Walpole’s works routinely adopt . . . Enlightenment [skepticism] while
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nonetheless applying that same skepticism to the tales of erudition and
exploration with which the proponents of the Enlightenment construct and
disseminate their claims to reason’ (p. 54), an approach Coykendall identifies
in Walpole’s massive Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors [1756–86],
which uses detailed citations and self-reflexive irreverence to foreground
multiplicity and contingency. Omitted from this review due to the unavailability of copies from the publishers are Howard Weinbrot’s Literature,
Religion, and the Evolution of Culture, 1660-1780 and The Age of Authors: an
Anthology of Eighteenth-Century Print Culture, edited by Paul Keen.
Work on the eighteenth-century novel this year remains, as ever, various and
strong, but with perhaps less emphasis on grand narratives and more attention
paid to ‘recovery’ and archival scholarship, and to the nuances of cultural and
public politics as manifest in the works of specific authors. As a case in point,
Laura E. Thomason’s book The Matrimonial Trap: Eighteenth-Century Women
Writers Redefine Marriage accomplishes the difficult feat of reflecting in fruitful
ways upon a much-canvassed topic: the eighteenth-century marriage plot, both
in fiction and reality, and women’s plight within and responses to it. Thomason’s
book does not directly concern Samuel Richardson, but his Clarissa [1747–8] is a
constant presence within the argument, as Thomason explores the restrictions
represented by marriage, but also the creative responses which both historical
women and female novelistic characters were able to make to these constraints.
Suggesting that, for all its apparent melodrama, Richardson’s novel in fact
represented in some sense a coalescing of the real anxieties of real women,
Thomason considers a cross-century range of women writers on marriage. For
the purposes of this review, the most significant chapters are those on Hester
Chapone, Sarah Scott, and Eliza Haywood (dedicated scholarship on Scott and
Haywood will be treated separately). Although Chapone is neither a novelist nor
a novelistic character, Thomason reads her Letters on Filial Obedience [1750–1]
through the medium of Chapone’s correspondence with Richardson, itself
sparked by a scene from Clarissa, suggesting that the letters represent on
Chapone’s part ‘a call for social change’ (p. 84). The chapter on Scott is a
welcome engagement with her critically underplayed final novel, The Test of
Filial Duty [1771], arguing that it explores the Richardsonian minutiae of the
strictures upon women represented by subscription to filial duty, which
ultimately, in Scott’s view, made untenable demands upon female self-expression
and individuality. Finally, the Haywood chapter, while it does not treat of
Haywood’s novels directly, provides a useful reading of her late-career conduct
and periodical literature, particularly The Wife and The Husband [both 1756]. All
in all, Thomason’s study brings together an intriguing and various selection of
material, much of it deserving of more attention, and will be of interest to
scholars of gender, women’s writing, and the novel.
In ‘The Tactility of Authorial Names’ (ECent 54[2013] 195–213), part of a
special edition of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation and also
discussed in Section 1 above, David Brewer considers author names in the
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2. The Novel
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novels and other texts of the 1760s, arguing that authors in the period were
seen not as people, but as ‘types, offices, personifications, objects, positions in
a field’ (p. 196) and that recognizing this has significant implications for how
we think about readers’ experience of texts. An intriguing example is a Cleland
text, marked emphatically with his name by an American reader, and
becoming a sort of talismanic object in itself. Considering a range of other
writers of the period, Brewer concludes that attention to names, reputations,
and physical inscriptions gives us a new sense of how to locate authors. In the
same number of the journal, Crystal Lake turns her attention to it-narratives
in ‘Feeling Things: The Novel Objectives of Sentimental Objects’ (ECent
54[2013] 183–93). Covering a range of such novels, Lake suggests that these
narratives, currently in receipt of increasing critical attention, can be seen as
fascinated with the workings of the five senses, considering the ways in which
they not only explore the limits of and anxieties surrounding mid-century
epistemologies, but also refer self-consciously to fictions as ‘objects’.
This year, Debbie Welham contributes further to her body of material on
Penelope Aubin: in a special edition of Women’s Writing, introduced by Jennie
Batchelor (WW 20[2013] 1–12) and focusing on the long eighteenth century,
Welham uses her essay ‘The Political Afterlife of Resentment in Penelope
Aubin’s The Life and Amorous Adventures of Lucinda (1721)’ (WW 20[2013]
49–63) to examine significant instances of intertextuality between inset tales in
Lucinda and Delarivier Manley’s work. Welham argues, however, that these
tales are part of a wider genre of ‘resentment novels’, which have a long
heritage and on which Manley drew to a large extent. Welham is thus able not
only to tease out the provenance of Aubin’s inset narratives, but to suggest
them as part of an intriguing and neglected genre.
An important event in recent Burney scholarship is Laura Kopp’s
translation of Francesca Saggini’s prize-winning Backstage in the Novel:
Frances Burney and the Theater Arts [2012]. Ranging through Evelina [1778],
Cecilia [1782], The Witlings [written 1778–9], and The Wanderer [1814], Saggini
argues for the theatre and theatricality as guiding metaphors and underpinning
principles of Burney’s oeuvre. A welcome addition to the comparatively recent
interest in the full range of Burney’s output, the book deploys an impressive
and erudite set of contexts, both in the eighteenth-century theatre and in
contemporary Burney criticism and recovery work. Following a detailed and
sophisticated survey of eighteenth-century theatrical contexts in chapter 1, the
book’s second chapter deals with Burney’s first novel, suggesting that it is both
‘inter-theatrical and interactive’ in its staging of emotive scenes (p. 89).
Although the idea of Evelina as closely connected with theatricality is not
novel, Saggini’s exceptionally careful reading plots specific scenes in the
novel against theatrical gestures and tropes to provide a thought-provoking
and very thorough reading. Chapters 4 and 5 address Cecilia, connecting the
novel not only to masquerade, but to a series of ‘spectacular sites’ where
performance and theatricality are relevant, such as Vauxhall, the Harrels’
home, and Tyburn (p. 145). The analysis suggests that the ‘fantastic costumes’
and disguises of masquerade and social performance ‘bring to the surface
[characters’] hidden moral qualities or defects and their secret desires’ (p. 190).
Although some of the book’s chapters are beyond the scope of this review,
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overall Kopp’s translation of Saggini’s argument is a valuable addition to
Burney scholarship.
Remarkably, two articles this year address the specific question of the
Marriage Act and its relation to Cecilia. Ann Campbell’s ‘Clandestine
Marriage and Frances Burney’s Critique of Marriage in Cecilia’ (ECLife
37[2013] 85–103) considers Burney’s ‘animadversion’ against the effects of
marriage as a social structure for young women. Seeing Burney’s novel as
partly in dialogue with John Shebbeare’s The Marriage Act [1754], and with
the Hardwicke Act, the article offers an attentive close reading of the novel,
pointing out how it mercilessly reduces its heroine to a travesty of the
self-determining heiress she once was through the medium of marriage.
Meanwhile, Melissa Ganz’s piece ‘Clandestine Schemes: Burney’s Cecilia and
the Marriage Act’ (ECent 54[2013] 25–51) begins with a reading of the fraught
conversation between the heroine and Mortimer Delvile as he tries to persuade
her to a secret marriage, suggesting that Burney’s portrayal of marriage
relations is more complex than has been previously acknowledged. Ganz also
sees the novel as warning of the dangers of contemporary constructions of
marriage, although ultimately she perhaps views Burney’s novel as more
moderate than Campbell might argue, concluding that Mortimer must finally
recognize Cecilia as an agent and an owner in her own right.
Also important for Burney scholars—although its concentration on the later
works and life mean that, strictly speaking, it falls outside the scope of this
review—is Devoney Looser’s ‘ ‘‘Her later works happily forgotten’’: Rewriting
Frances Burney and Old Age’ (ECLife 37[2013] 1–28), which builds on the
work of Looser’s recent monograph on women writers and ageing in the
period, Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750–1850, analysing
the 1832 Memoirs of Doctor Burney in particular. Similarly significant,
although also falling later than this review’s remit, is Simon MacDonald’s
prize-winning essay in The Review of English Studies, ‘Identifying Mrs Meeke:
Another Burney Family Novelist’ (RES 64[2013] 367–85), which suggests that
a highly prolific Minerva Press novelist was in fact a stepsister of Burney’s. Of
additional note are two pieces focusing on the later novels Camilla [1796] and
The Wanderer [1814]: Jennifer Locke argues, in ‘Dangerous Fortune-Telling in
Frances Burney’s Camilla’ (ECF 25[2013] 701–20), that the novel’s opening
scenes in which Sir Hugh tries to predict the futures of the Tyrold children
signify a greater interest in means of predicting the future based on type and
character. She accordingly reads the novel against a range of fortune-telling
manuals and treatises on probability. Meanwhile, in the same issue, Tara
Czechowski, ‘ ‘‘Black, Patched and Pennyless’’: Race and Crime in Burney’s
The Wanderer’ (ECF 25[2013] 677–700), steers away from analysing the
politics of The Wanderer in terms of Anglo-French relations and instead seizes
upon Juliet’s initial disguise as a black woman, arguing persuasively that
Burney does not replicate, but rather problematizes, assumptions about black
criminality, as her novel canvasses the hostile reaction to Juliet’s apparent skin
colour. She suggests intriguingly that ‘It is Burney’s innovation, however, to
anticipate accurately later historians’ recognition that the definition of crime in
this period derived from middle- and upper-class fears about the preservation
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of status and property’, and that this helps explain the novel’s ongoing
association of Juliet with criminality.
An important addition to scholarship on John Cleland this year is Richard
Terry and Helen Williams’s satisfyingly detailed account of the uncovering of
material relating to the Delaval family’s relationship with the novelist, ‘John
Cleland and the Delavals’ (RES 64[2013] 795–818), arguing that they
effectively acted as his patrons during a period of his life about which only
a paucity of information survives. Tracking the relationship between Cleland
and different members of this family, Terry and Williams add an important
note to the useful accounts already given in Hal Gladfelder’s recent biography,
Fanny Hill in Bombay: The Making and Unmaking of John Cleland [2012]; like
the biography, this essay will certainly become required reading for any critic
of Cleland.
Perhaps the most important piece of work on Daniel Defoe this year is
Robert James Merrett’s monograph Daniel Defoe: Contrarian. Setting his
argument against a formidable backdrop of late twentieth-century and
contemporary Defoe criticism, Merrett seizes upon the rich ambiguities,
repetitions, and contraries of Defoe’s language to read his work in rhetorical,
discursive, and narratological terms. This allows him to claim that Defoe’s
interest in the paradoxical and the ambivalent means that he requires a critical
praxis that can sustain attention to multiple, contrary levels of meaning at
once. Throughout, the study is necessarily strongly interested also in Defoe’s
theological resonances, usefully marrying the close study of his language with
the religious implications of his stylistics (importantly, rather than with
Defoe’s own putative beliefs). The first chapter argues that Defoe ‘create[d]
readers by endowing them with new habits’ (p. 4), opening up for his readers
new and multiple meanings to create a more polyvalent textual engagement.
Merrett uses discourse analysis to concentrate particularly on polysemy, verbal
and structural repetition, and deliberate employment of logical contradiction,
ranging through a variety of Defoe’s fictional canon. The second chapter
moves on to consider how Defoe’s non-fiction as well as fiction ‘dramatize[s]
questions about the nature and scope of reflection’ (p. 50), anatomizing the
idea of reflection as subject to abuse and narrowly limited reasoning as well as
being productive of insight. As with other chapters, this allows for a rereading
of major works, including Moll Flanders [1722], Captain Singleton [1721], and
Crusoe [1719]. Subsequent chapters develop the idea of reflection as well as
examining biblical allusion and the tensions inherent in ‘applying’ the Bible
to ‘the mundane world’; throughout, Merrett attends fruitfully to Defoe’s
‘train[ing]’ of his readership to read in more creative and attuned ways
(pp. 135–6). The middle chapters turn to politics, broadly conceived,
addressing liberty, monarchy, and Defoe’s engagement with divisions within
and reformation of the Whigs, characterizing his work as possessing a
qualified sort of ‘institutional conservatism’ (p. 200). Politics also extends to
consider the gendered politics of marriage, family, sex, and love, which
typically emerge as both ‘traditional and progressive’ (p. 230). While the study
as a whole is consistently thorough and impressive, the last chapter is perhaps
the most satisfying, drawing together arguments from throughout the book to
characterize Defoe as ‘a more powerfully expressive writer and more original
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fabulist than has been acknowledged’ (p. 278). The conclusion is certainly
justified, and Merrett’s book should be read by anyone with an interest in
Defoe scholarship.
Continuing the turn in recent years towards transatlantic and postcolonial
readings of Defoe, Jacob Crane’s essay ‘The Long Transatlantic Career of the
Turkish Spy’ (Transatlantic Studies 10[2013] 228–46) examines an ur-text for
Defoe’s Continuation of Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy [1718], Giovanni
Marana’s Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy [1683], which appeared first in Paris
and later in English versions. Defoe’s sequel is one of several responses that
appropriate Mahmut the Arabian, the original novel’s central spy character,
whom Crane considers from a range of angles as he is explored in the different
texts. This valuable and interesting essay claims that Marana’s novel exerted a
wider influence on the writing of Defoe (notably Robinson Crusoe) as well as
on the work of Oliver Goldsmith and others, identifying it as a ‘subject of
world literature’. Of tangential interest to the scholar of Robinson Crusoe is
Steve Mentz’s meditation on the categories and boundaries of eco-criticism,
‘ ‘‘Making the green one red’’: Dynamic Ecologies in Macbeth, James Barlow’s
Journal, and Robinson Crusoe’ (JEMCS 13[2013] 66–83), which seeks,
amongst other projects, to read the novel ‘against the realist tradition it is
supposed to have founded’, as a ‘symbolic renovation of swimming as a way
of responding to eco-catastrophe’ (p. 76). W.R. Owens’s piece on ‘Defoe,
Robinson Crusoe and the Barbary Pirates’ (English 62[2013] 51–66), meanwhile, focusing on the adventure of the Barbary pirates or corsairs at the
novel’s opening, presents a valuable and richly detailed historicization of the
episode, suggesting that Defoe’s wider thought on the eradication of Barbary
piracy is relevant here, and rather tied in to commercial motivations than to
imperialist drives.
A Journal of the Plague Year continues to receive critical reinterpretation
this year. James Cruise’s essay ‘A Journal of the Plague Year: Defoe’s
Grammatology and the Secrets of Belonging’ (ECent 54[2013] 479–95) reads
Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year [1722] with ‘an eye for paradox’, rethinking
the text’s idea of modernity through the trope of the plague as the ‘Face’ of
London. Seeing the text’s narrator, H.F., as in some ways unaware of the
implications of his own writing, Cruise concludes by modifying the famously
triumphalist tone of the concluding lines, seeing the plague as ‘undo[ing] itself’,
rather than being ordered or reduced by the text. Also interested in the plague
and perception, Helen Thompson, in ‘ ‘‘It was impossible to know these
People’’: Secondary Qualities and the Form of Character in A Journal of the
Plague Year’ (ECent 54[2013] 154–67), suggests that the text engages with a
question which ‘proceeds from’ the discourse of Lockean secondary qualities:
how persons perceive themselves. In a comparatively brief but trenchant
analysis, Thompson shows that plague was a trope used in other texts
interested in similar relevant questions, most notably Boyle’s work on
corpuscular philosophy. How to know the sick from the sound, and the
mechanisms of disease transmission, are issues which animate both Boyle and
Defoe. Meanwhile, Caitlin Kelly’s brief essay, ‘Private Meditations and Public
History in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year’ (Explicator 71[2013]
52–5), sees H.F. as deliberately suppressing some of his own personal, visceral
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reactions to the events he sees as a means of engaging readers’ sympathy and
interest.
Kate Loveman’s piece, ‘ ‘‘A life of continu’d variety’’: Crime, Readers, and
the Structure of Defoe’s Moll Flanders’ (ECF 26[2013] 1–32), takes as its wider
topic the notion of what authors and booksellers of the period considered a
desideratum for audiences of prose fiction: variety. Surveying critics of
Defovean form, who see the novel’s episodic structure as evidence of a lack of
technique, of an interest in casuistry, or of a ‘strategy’, Loveman argues
persuasively that in fact, an appeal to the idea of ‘variety’—a term covering
changes of mood, tone, topic, and even swaps between historicity and
fictionality—is not only a key structuring principle in Moll Flanders but one
that may explain the form of many early-century fictions.
Also of relevance to the Defoe scholar, though not strictly within the scope
of this review, is Julian Fung’s valuable argument in ‘Religion and the
Anglican Narrator in Defoe’s Tour’ (SEL 53[2013] 565–82), which suggests
that, as well as seeing the Tour as an economic vision for Britain, it can also
fruitfully be read as a survey of the state of the nation’s religious practice and
health, and concludes with comments on the attribution of the text, and on
understanding the text’s narrator. Similarly useful on the Tour is Pat Rogers’s
further set of explanatory notes in ‘References in Defoe’s Tour thro’ Great
Britain, Volume II’ (N&Q 60[2013] 558–70). One should also note Paul
Young’s ‘Industrializing Crusoe: Adventure, Modernity, and Anglo-American
Expansionism’ (JVC 18[2013] 36–53), which considers nineteenth-century
Robinsonades as a means of thinking about the profit motive and ‘open[ing]
up pre-industrial parts of the world as sites for profitable modernization’.
Scholarship on Henry Fielding continues to attend to both his religious and
legal positions. Carol Stewart’s essay on ‘Joseph Andrews and the Sacrifice of
Isaac: Faith, Works and Anticlericalism’ (L&T 27[2013] 18–31) explores the
significance of the Genesis story of Abraham and Isaac to Fielding’s novel,
adding useful nuance to understandings of his Anglicanism. Arguing that
the novelist defends Anglicanism per se while complicating the function of
the clergy, Stewart focuses on the ‘minor controversy’ in the 1730s over the
sacrifice of Isaac, which, she suggests, may have found its way into Fielding’s
novel. This has the ultimate effect of ‘undermin[ing] the claims of the clergy to
any special authority in the very literal enactment of the impossibility of
sacrificing Isaac’, and, by implication, reflects on such claims more widely.
Meanwhile, in a considered and thought-provoking discussion, Joseph Drury’s
‘Realism’s Ghosts: Science and Spectacle in Tom Jones’ (Novel 46[2013] 50–72)
teases out the tensions inherent in identifying Fielding’s novels as ‘realist’ (or
not). Juxtaposing critics who have historically read Fielding’s plots as realistic
with those who want to see them as ‘antirealist’ and even dependent upon
‘magical’ principles, Drury argues that both sides miss the subtleties of the
governing principles of Tom Jones’s narrative method. Instead, he suggests,
the narrative can be understood through seeing it as attentive to ‘philosophical
performance’.
Scott MacKenzie’s award-winning book on the rise of the middle-class idea
of ‘home’ is valuable in a number of respects, but for this review it is chiefly
interesting for its chapter on Fielding’s Joseph Andrews [1742], the parish, and
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vagrancy. The first chapter of Be It Ever So Humble: Poverty, Fiction, and the
Invention of the Middle-Class Home discusses Fielding’s contributions to
debates over homelessness and the role of the parish in dealing with it, using
this as a lens to read the fiction. Considering ridicule, vanity, and hypocrisy
within the novel, MacKenzie argues in this chapter that Fielding’s fiction
works to ‘discipline the excesses of the great’ (p. 74), which are made manifest
in their dealings with the precariously housed. The analysis provides a useful
discussion of the interrelation between Fielding’s socio-political thought and
his novels.
Although not related to Fielding’s novels, Frederick Ribble’s article on
‘Fielding at the Bar: A Reappraisal’ (SIP 110[2013] 903–13) should be singled
out amongst this year’s Fielding scholarship for note. Adding to his previous
valuable work recovering lost Fielding material, Ribble has uncovered a
‘character’ of Fielding as barrister in the Pratt Manuscripts at the Kent
History and Library Centre, throwing new light on the novelist’s legal career.
The following work relevant to Fielding could not be accessed in time for this
review and will be considered next year: Charles Trainor’s ‘Fielding and the
Morality of Music’ (Neophil 97[2013] 775–83).
Work on Sarah Fielding this year is less various, but still valuable. In a lucid
and useful argument, Patrick Fleming suggests, in his essay ‘The Rise of
the Moral Tale: Children’s Literature, the Novel, and The Governess’ (ECS
46[2013] 463–77), that studies of the novel have overshadowed scholarship on
children’s literature to the extent that tales constructed specifically for children
are often regarded too simplistically, or lazily caught up under the catch-all
term of ‘novel’; instead, he posits, ‘moral tale’ is a more accurate term, and a
distinct genre worthy of discrete study. In this argument, Sarah Fielding takes
a central role, following a re-examination of the relationship between realism
and didacticism. In a valuable addition to studies of literature written for
children, Fleming examines the role of mimesis in the text’s didactic purposes
and the frame narrative’s part in guiding interpretation.
This year’s work on Eliza Haywood is enriched by another new edition of
her work—an ongoing part of the ‘recovery’ of this major novelist. Carol
Stewart’s edition of The Rash Resolve [1723] and Life’s Progress through the
Passions [1748] combines two works that in some ways bookend Haywood’s
career, touching on the ferociously prolific period of the 1720s and the later,
‘sentimental’, stage of her output. Since this is the first time these two novels
have appeared in modern critical editions, they are particularly useful
additions to scholarly work on Haywood. The introduction, which is
accessible enough for undergraduate students to use, outlines significant
readings of the texts, particularly the Martha Sansom-Richard Savage scandal
which may be alluded to in The Rash Resolve, and the Jacobite resonances of
the later fiction. Stewart argues for both novels as defying the labels of
‘cautionary tale’ and conventionally ‘moral’ fiction, however, showing that, in
common with much of Haywood’s other work, they are susceptible of rather
more ambiguous and provocative readings. The notes and editorial apparatus
are generous and detailed, without being overpowering; this is a useful edition
both for scholars and students, and will be helpful in bringing Haywood’s
fiction to a yet wider audience.
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Although Ros Ballaster’s admirably wide-ranging article on the mythological Euphrosyne, ‘ ‘‘Heart-Easing Mirth’’: Charm in the Eighteenth
Century’ (EIC 63[2013] 249–74), is largely devoted to the figure as deployed
in non-novel genres, the piece concludes by seeing her as a ‘novelised figure’, a
‘figure for women’s comic and creative agency in writing’ (p. 250). In its final
pages, it offers an analysis of ‘Euphrosine’ who appears in Haywood’s
periodical writings, usefully connecting the use of this figure to a larger pattern
of invocation in the period.
Ballaster’s work also forms the starting-point for an important essay
published this year on Haywood: Carol Stewart’s ‘Eliza Haywood’s The
Fortunate Foundlings: A Jacobite Novel’ (ECLife 37[2013] 51–71), which nails
its colours to the mast in the title. Noting that, even today, critics are slow to
attend to Haywood’s politics, Stewart adds to a body of material which reads
her extensive oeuvre in terms of its Jacobite tendencies. Focusing on The
Fortunate Foundlings [1744], but extending her range through rather more of
the canon, Stewart provides an intriguing and detailed case, which also points
more widely to the often obtuse history within literary scholarship of
dismissing or failing to recognize the importance of Jacobitism to some
major texts of the period.
Haywood’s fellow ‘amatory’ novelist, Delarivier Manley, receives attention
in Carole Sargent’s essay ‘Military Scandal and National Debt in Manley’s
New Atalantis’ (SEL 53[2013] 523–40). Sargent seeks to unravel the meanings
behind what she terms the ‘anomalously long, vague episode’ of Elonora,
suggesting that its apparent lack of amenability to being read as a Torymotivated satire has meant that it has historically puzzled scholars. In an
important argument, Sargent seeks to redress this balance by reading the tale
as a masterfully indirect reference to national debt and military corruptibility,
anticipating, in some sense, later Tory charges against Marlborough.
Although not strictly works of novel scholarship, no review article touching
on Samuel Richardson can neglect to mention the Cambridge edition of his
correspondence, which begins to appear in this year under the general
editorship of Peter Sabor and Tom Keymer, with further volumes promised.
Christine Gerrard edits the Correspondence with Aaron Hill and the Hill
Family, while John Dussinger, adding to his considerable body of work on
the novelist, co-edits the Correspondence with George Cheyne and Thomas
Edwards along with David Shuttleton. Both volumes do a significant service
to Richardson criticism by gathering together the scattered letters in the
National Art Library’s Forster Collections and elsewhere to produce a
coherent and reliably dated account of the author’s extensive and minute
correspondence with friends, admirers, and other literary figures. The edition
is particularly valuable not simply for its collating of the correspondence, but
also for its appendices, often comparatively hard-to-access manuscript and
rare sources, such as Richardson’s painstaking index to his correspondence
with Thomas Edwards or material by the Hill family enclosed in their letters to
Richardson. As with the same publisher’s edition of the works, the edition
of the correspondence promises fair to become a groundbreaking work in
Richardson scholarship, and of particular importance to a novelist so invested
in the form of the familiar letter.
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Richardson studies are enriched this year, too, by a number of considered
and rewarding essays on Sir Charles Grandison [1753–4], sometimes the
poor cousin of the canon. Anna Deters’s prize-winning essay ‘ ‘‘Glorious
Perverseness’’: Stoic Pride and Domestic Heroism in Richardson’s Novels’
(ECF 26[2013] 67–92) offers a probing and genuinely valuable reading of
stoicism as key to ‘heroic pride’ in Richardson’s fiction, most notably in
Grandison. Deters argues perceptively that the ‘exemplary stature’ or publicfacing virtue of the novel’s hero is rooted, at least in part, in ‘private
self-concern’, thus teasing out some of the nuances of the hero’s complex and
often underrated morality. Drawing on a wide range of articulations of
stoicism in the period, from Milton to Elizabeth Carter, Deters is able to show
that notions of stoicism thread their way through the moral heroism of
Richardson’s protagonists generally, concluding that Grandison represents a
turn towards a ‘deeper’ consideration of ‘the problem of stoic pride’, offering
richly detailed readings of the novel in support of this claim. Another reading
of Grandison is Patrick Mello’s ‘ ‘‘Piety and Popishness’’: Tolerance and the
Epistolary Reaction to Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison’ (ECF 25[2013]
511–31), which contributes to long-running debates over the nature of
‘tolerance’ in Richardson’s last novel. Mello makes a case for the novel as, in
fact, intolerant, using letters written to the novelist in response to Grandison as
source material. In this way, Mello’s argument also constitutes a welcome
addition to the general turn towards archival scholarship and focus on
Richardson’s letters, which is increasingly being enabled by the release of the
Cambridge Correspondence. Touching on anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish
sentiment, Mello suggests that the novel’s apparent challenge to ‘Protestant
exceptionalism’ is at odds with Richardson’s culture. Finally, Martha Koehler
contributes an essay on the idea of suspense in Richardson, identifying this as
a key element picked up by eighteenth-century appreciators of Richardson’s
creative praxis. In ‘The Problem of Suspense in Richardson’s Sir Charles
Grandison’ (ECent 54[2013] 317–38), Koehler argues that ‘suspense’ occurs in
Grandison on a number of levels, from the rhetorical to the structural.
Focusing largely on plots and debates over love and marriage, whose
conclusions are drawn out over the (considerable) length of the novel, she
ultimately relates Richardson’s ‘innovations’ in the novel to his exploration of
epistolary form.
In ‘A Case for Hard-Heartedness: Clarissa, Indifferency, Impersonality’
(ECF 26[2013] 33–65), Wendy Anne Lee offers a Lockean reading of
Clarissa—familiar enough, perhaps, but this analysis concentrates on the
quality of ‘indifferency’, not often discussed in this context, and focuses
particularly on Clarissa’s experience as a ‘rape survivor’. In an avowedly
secular reading, Lee suggests that Locke’s theories offer an ‘extreme form of
social detachment that serves the cause of intellectual and physical freedom’,
and this can be seen as a motivating factor in Clarissa’s refusal to marry
Lovelace. The essay’s value lies in part in its refusal of simplistic binaries such
as the belief that Clarissa is secretly in love with Lovelace versus the idea that
she is simply incapable of feeling love, and also in its lengthy and considered
reading of Clarissa’s post-rape experience. Meanwhile, in ‘Posthumous
Presence in Clarissa’ (SEL 53[2013] 601–21), James Bryant Reeves suggests
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as a framework for the novel not Locke, but John Norris, building on work
such as E. Derek Taylor’s recent monograph on this topic. Reeves argues that
Clarissa contains two Clarissas, one ‘diegetic’ and one ‘transcendent’, and
that not only does this duality force her fellow-characters to ‘re-read’ her life,
but it presses the novel’s readership to do so too. A very different approach
to Clarissa is taken by Marta Kvande’s essay ‘Printed in a Book: Negotiating
Print and Manuscript Cultures in Fantomina and Clarissa’ (ECS 46[2013]
239–57), which pairs two texts not often mentioned in the same breath.
Kvande argues that Richardson’s novel employs ‘a fantasy of manuscript’, but
really depends on the underlying, superior authority of print culture. Using
Haywood’s novel as a point of comparison, the essay explores in depth
the idea of ‘authenticity’ as attached to manuscript, concluding that the
‘direct link’ between ‘body, letter, and self’ posited in Richardson’s fiction is
ultimately untenable except in a print form, which more effectively preserves
the impossible ideal of purity articulated in the novel’s epistolary exchanges.
Finally, Ann Wagner takes on the much-addressed topic of Clarissa’s refusal
to engage in litigation with Lovelace in ‘Sexual Assault in the Shadow of the
Law: Character and Proof in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa’ (LawL 25[2013]
311–26). Wagner suggests that Clarissa in fact does not reject, but depends
upon law, albeit using an alternative set of legal processes for her own
vindication.
An important new argument this year canvasses Richardson’s involvement
as editor of Mary Astell’s 1730 version of Some Reflections upon Marriage. In
‘Mary Astell’s Revision of Some Reflections upon Marriage’ (PBSA 107[2013]
49–79), John Dussinger argues that in his capacity as printer, Richardson was
responsible for emendations to Astell’s text, as the author herself, in poor
health, had ceased editing her own work. Although it does not strictly concern
the novels, the piece is an important one for the Richardson scholar.
Articles this year which touch interestingly on Richardson include Thomas
Koenigs’s ‘ ‘‘Whatever may be the merit of my book as a fiction’’: Wieland’s
Instrumental Fictionality’ (ELH 79[2012] 715–45), which sees Charles
Brockden Brown’s Romantic novel as revising Richardson’s didactic
method, paying particular attention to Clarissa. Also of note here is James
Fowler’s analysis of Voltaire’s adaptation of Pamela, ‘The Best of All Possible
Marriages: Voltaire and Frederick in Pame´la’ (FS 67[2013] 478–93), which
examines the ‘art’ of Voltaire’s text.
The following work relevant to Richardson was not available in time for
review and will be covered next year: Julian Jimenez Hefferman’s article,
‘Pamela’s Hands: Political Intangibility and the Production of Manners’
(Novel 46[2013] 26–49) and Kyungwon Shin’s ‘The Collision and Coexistence
of the Romantic, Realistic, and the Anti-Romantic Narratives in Samuel
Richardson’s Clarissa’ (BAF1900 19[2013] 147–77).
Although Sarah Scott scholarship this year has been largely beyond the
scope of this review, focused as it is on novel scholarship, it is worth noting the
publication of Nicole Pohl’s important edition of Scott’s Letters.
When reviewing the year’s Laurence Sterne scholarship, The Shandean is
always a primary point of reference. The journal this year contains a
preponderance of material on Tristram Shandy. The opening three pieces
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approach the novel from angles of material and print culture, and the
formation of the text on the page. Leann Alspaugh’s generously illustrated
‘ ‘‘Howgarth’s witty chisel’’: Hogarth’s Frontispieces for Tristram Shandy’
(Shandean 24[2013] 9–30) suggests that considering the artist’s Analysis of
Beauty [1753] and his illustrations for Sterne’s novel help to contextualize the
ways in which the two men worked together, complementing one another in
their interest in the unfinished, the provisional, the various, and the dynamic.
Nicholas Nace’s ‘Unprinted Matter: Conceptual Writing and Tristram
Shandy’s ‘‘Chasm of Ten Pages’’ ’ (Shandean 24[2013] 31–58) opens amusingly
with an epigraph gleaned from Google books; taking as central the ideas of
‘lack’ and ‘trace’, Nace considers the impact of the putative missing ten pages
of the novel represented by the absence of a chapter in volume 4. Relating this
lacuna to the conceits of contemporary conceptual writing, Nace explores
Sterne’s textual experiments, including those he shies away from or avoids
(such as plays with the long ‘s’ character), allowing Sterne and the
contemporary to comment mutually upon one another. Finally, in ‘Visual
Textuality in Tristram Shandy, Print Technologies, and the Future of the
Novel’ (Shandean 24[2013] 59–69), Zoë Eckman frames the novel as ‘a
technology’ which has been undergoing change and renewal since Sterne’s own
period. This allows her to see Tristram Shandy as a textual object that is in
many ways characteristically of its own century, with its famous ‘pre-postmodernness’ potentially blinding us to the ways in which it is always already
an ‘interactive, interpretive technological object’; equally, her comparisons
with twenty-first-century plays with printing and textual production reflect
fruitfully back on the original novel. In a related vein is the volume’s
concluding essay by M.C. Newbould, ‘ ‘‘Illustrating’’ A Sentimental Journey:
The First ‘‘Annotated’’ Edition of 1803?’ (Shandean 24[2013] 147–77).
Newbould’s thorough argument considers the insertion of various kinds of
textual apparatus into versions of Sterne’s novel, particularly footnotes
and images, as well as the ways in which layout, typeface, and the space
on the page begin to be used in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries.
Three further essays in the volume consider Sterne in relation to the foreign.
In ‘Pushkin Reads Sterne: About One Note in Pushkin’s Novel Eugene
Onegin’ (Shandean 24[2013] 93–103), Peter Budrin explores a reference in
Pushkin’s novel to Yorick, querying whether or not the Russian author was
thinking of Hamlet’s former court jester—or Sterne’s character. Ultimately,
the ambiguous reference is, he concludes, a compliment to Sterne in setting
him alongside the playwright. Natalia Rezmer-Mrówczyńska takes up the
question of Sterne’s relation to the Polish Enlightenment in ‘Sterne in Poland
in the Age of Enlightenment’ (Shandean 24[2013] 117–26). Here, she argues
that Sterne becomes a central figure in the Polish Enlightenment, his work
considered alongside Rousseau’s as expressing political freedom, and inspiring
a widespread ‘Sternism’, or early nineteenth-century interest in the novelist’s
work. In a brief but fascinating piece written from a very different national
perspective, Kazuki Ochiai considers ‘Soseki Natsume; Or Sterne in the
Japanese ‘‘Rise of the Novel’’ ’ (Shandean 24[2013] 127–34), exploring the
late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novelist Natsume’s influence on
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bringing Sterne into cultural visibility in Japan, seeing him as having a critical
foresight which in some ways precedes the ‘great’ Sterne critics of the midtwentieth-century Western scholarly establishment.
Meanwhile, James Gow, in ‘Were Sterne’s Sermons Novel?’ (Shandean
24[2013] 70–83), takes on the vexed and related questions of Sterne’s use of
sermons within his fiction and of the author’s ‘novelty’. Positioning his piece
as a corrective to some recent accounts, Gow’s detailed discussion sees Sterne
as working within a latitudinarian tradition which seeks to engage a lay
audience but is also comfortable with multiple layers of accessible truth.
A very different take on Tristram Shandy is offered by Patrizia Nerozzi
Bellman, who sets that novel alongside another of Sterne’s works in ‘Dancing
Away: Escape Strategy in Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey’
(Shandean 24[2013] 135–46), which considers the central motif of dance in each
fiction. Beginning with a consideration of dance in the period, the essay
addresses the functions of dance at figurative and literal levels within the text,
drawing out a series of rich examples. In addition to Newbould’s essay, above,
there are then two further essays focusing more closely on Sentimental
Journey: Allan Ingram’s ‘From Seville to Sentimentality: Sterne and ‘‘A Pinch
of Snuff’’ ’ (Shandean 24[2013] 84–92) takes for its topic this ‘Dust’,
simultaneously ‘bountiful’, ‘disgusting’, and ‘addictive’. Tracing discussions
and motifs of the tobacco product prior to Sterne’s fiction, Ingram goes on to
argue that snuff plays an ambiguous role throughout, with the novelist
consciously exploiting the substance’s double-edged reputation. Frédéric
Ogée’s ‘The Erratic and the Erotic: The Aesthetics of A Sentimental
Journey’ (Shandean 24[2013] 104–16) takes a rather different line on the
novel, concentrating on the fragmented, interrupted nature of narratives and
episodes within the fiction. Seeing this as of particular importance to
understanding the book’s erotics, the essay homes in on the fille de chambre
episode, concluding that here and elsewhere Sterne employs an aesthetic that
deliberately ‘shuns the fake linearity . . . of narrative fiction’ (p. 114). This
year’s edition of The Shandean thus provides a various and stimulating
contribution to scholarship of the novelist, and readers may be interested to
know that the journal will, from 2014, be published independently by the
International Laurence Sterne Foundation; more information, including about
supporting the journal, can be found at www.shandean.org.
In a deliberately and playfully provocative argument, Pierre Bayard’s article
‘Anticipatory Plagiarism’ (NLH 44[2013] 231–50), translated by Jeffrey
Mehlman, argues that literary history is generally confined by ‘an overly
rigid conception of time’ (p. 231). The piece ranges through a vast swathe of
literary history, considering how writers may be inspired or draw influence
from those who come after them. Settling on Tristram Shandy as an example,
Bayard declares Sterne to be a writer not of the eighteenth, but of the twentieth
or twenty-first century, although he admits that this may be seen as an ‘error’
(p. 238); nonetheless, he maintains that Sterne’s true place is less as a precursor
of the modern novel than a participant in its construction. If Bayard is perhaps
not finally convincing, this is at least a fruitful and fascinating thought
experiment.
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Jessica Matuozzi’s essay ‘Schoolhouse Follies: Tristram Shandy and the
Male Reader’s Tutelage’ (ELH 80[2013] 489–518) sees Sterne’s novel as calling
forth responses particularly from its original gentleman readers, whose
methods of reading (imbibed through education) were especially challenged
and modified through the novel’s ambition to mould their reading practices.
Arguing that the text generally displays ‘an ardent interest’ in orchestrating
its own reception, Matuozzi engages in a fascinating analysis of how
eighteenth-century male readers were schooled into reading, seeing Sterne’s
novel as deliberately bucking the patterns such readers would have known.
By contrast, in ‘The Refraction of Geometry: Tristram Shandy and the
Poetics of War, 1700–1800’ (Rep 123[2013] 23–52), Anders Engberg-Pedersen
is concerned less with the text’s reception than with its role in a wider
discourse: in this case, of the ‘poetics of war’. Setting Tristram Shandy in light
of a range of ‘fictional, nonfictional, and forged’ texts on war, the article
considers the roles of chance and probability in ‘war media’ writing, relating
this not only to Sterne’s novel but to a spurious continuation of it (p. 24).
Amit Yahav, meanwhile, centralizes a different concept, ‘sonority’, as key
to reading several of the novel’s episodes. ‘Sonorous Duration: Tristram
Shandy and the Temporality of Novels’ (PMLA 128[2013] 872–87) takes
a formalist approach, allowing Yahav to see the novel as narrated in a
‘rhythmic’ fashion which is intended to correspond to readerly experience
of time.
Paul Goring provides a useful footnote to Sterne scholarship this year
by tentatively identifying the recipient of a 1768 letter by the novelist as
Luke Scrafton (N&Q 60[2013] 93–5). Also of interest here is Melvyn New’s
and Robert G. Walker’s piece, again in Notes & Queries, addressing the
trope of ‘wrestling with a chimney-sweep’ in Sterne’s Political Romance
[1759] (N&Q 60[2013] 91–3), and Robert Walker’s untangling of a phrase
from Sterne’s correspondence in ‘Sterne’s Locked Up Boots’ (N&Q 60[2013]
582–3).
Some material this year was either unavailable from publishers or did
not arrive in time for review. This will be covered wherever possible next
year. It includes Steven Moore’s The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600–
1800; Paula Backscheider’s Elizabeth Singer Rowe and the Development of
the English Novel; Anne Bandry-Scubbi and Peter de Voogd’s collection
Hilarion’s Asse: Laurence Sterne and Humour; volume 5 of Jacqueline
Labbé’s History of British Women’s Writing; Mary-Céline Newbould’s
Adaptations of Laurence Sterne’s Fiction; and Chloe Wigston Smith’s
Women, Work, and Clothes in the Eighteenth Century. Books relevant to
the novel but reviewed elsewhere in this volume include Alex Wetmore’s
Men of Feeling in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Touching Fiction; Jon
Mee’s Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community; Sophie
Vasset’s Medicine and Narration in the Eighteenth Century (Voltaire
Foundation [2013]); and, elsewhere in this chapter, Shaun Regan’s Reading
1759; Emrys Jones’s Friendship and Allegiance in Eighteenth-Century
Literature; and Jolene Zigarovich’s collection Sex and Death in EighteenthCentury Literature.
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This year saw an exciting range of work published on eighteenth-century
poetry; the Scriblerians were well represented, but so too were a host of women
writers, non-canonical poets, and creators of oral forms. Literature from
England, Scotland, Ireland, and the American colonies all received scholarly
attention, and innovative approaches to familiar and less familiar poetry
further enlivened what was already a fascinating spread of scholarship. There
were also some genuinely challenging pieces which offer potentially new ways
of thinking about poetry and authorship in this period.
First, though, a book from 2012 that unfortunately did not come to hand in
time for review in last year’s journal. Margaret Koehler’s Poetry of Attention in
the Eighteenth Century is, not to be superficial, a very beautiful book, in
addition to being a rigorous and engaging study of the concept of ‘attention’
in poetry of the period. Koehler roots her book in the ‘philosophical,
psychological, and literary’ history of attention (p. 15); she asks what literary
studies ‘can contribute to the study of a phenomenon that today is typically
analyzed in a laboratory with an fMRI machine’ (p. 7), and her work offers
a convincing answer: a great deal, not least of which is a fuller understanding
of the pedagogical aims of the poetry of attention, which sought ‘to teach
the skills and habits of attention to readers’ (p. 12). Koehler is aware of the
implications for her own, and our, teaching practice, and states: ‘I want to
endorse eighteenth-century poetry as eminently [. . .] teachable’, as well as to
‘advance its admirable purpose to train readers as poets’ attentive successors’
(p. 13). Woven throughout the study is an alertness to the pedagogical
possibilities of this kind of poetry in modern university classrooms, adding
further value to an already valuable book. The poets with whom Koehler
engages are pleasingly many and varied, including John Philips, John Gay,
Alexander Pope, William Collins, Anne Finch, John Dryden, Jonathan Swift,
Mark Akenside, Thomas Gray, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Edward
Young, Thomas Warton, and Anna Barbauld; most scholars of the period will
find something of interest here. Koehler also looks back to Restoration poetry
in order to trace continuities of ideas and sentiments between this period and
the eighteenth century, and one of her most interesting findings is the
rootedness of eighteenth-century odes in the concerns of earlier poetry, giving
credence to her claim that ‘the borders between Restoration and mid century
phases’ of the ode are far from absolute (p. 86). The conclusion helpfully
points out the applicability of this study’s findings and methodology to other
areas of enquiry, including ‘the present cultural preoccupation with attention,
the rising status of cognitive approaches to literature’, revisionist accounts of
the period, and ‘the tendency to historicize particular categories of mental
experience’ (p. 207). As such, this study deserves to be read not only by
specialists in eighteenth-century poetry, but also by those interested in the
history of science, psychology, and cognition.
The poetry of Alexander Pope continued in 2013 to receive considerable
attention. While Emrys D. Jones’s Friendship and Allegiance in EighteenthCentury Literature: The Politics of Private Virtue in the Age of Walpole, is not
focused solely on poetry, Pope’s work is a touchstone throughout, especially
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his Epistle to Bathurst, which is present as an exemplar during much of the
discussion, as well as being the subject of chapter 4. That said, the emphasis of
Jones’s study is on cultural history, and though poetry is well represented as
part of that culture it is not subject to any particularly rigorous textual
analysis. Jones’s thesis is that ‘the very concept of private friendship was
profoundly ambivalent at this time’ (p. 3), and he looks at a range of cultural
responses to various public crises of the early eighteenth century, including
several works written by the Scriblerians, to test ‘how ideas and ideals of
private friendship were challenged in response’ to these events (p. 21). In
addition to well-known writers Jones also examines works by anonymous and
lesser-known poets, including Patrick Delany’s The Pheasant and the Lark
[1730], and Mary Barber, who are discussed in chapter 6 alongside Jonathan
Swift. This gives a useful breadth to Jones’s study.
Also published this year were reissues of two teaching editions of Pope’s
poetry from CUP’s Pitt series of schoolbooks. The erudition of these texts,
Alfred S. West’s edition of Essay on Criticism (originally published in 1896)
and A. Hamilton Thompson’s 1913 edition of the Essay on Man, is still
evident, and it is likely that their work will still be useful to the student (and
indeed the more experienced scholar) of Pope’s poetry. The Pitt series was
intended ‘to supply the student with a readable text of one of the chief
masterpieces of eighteenth-century poetry’, and these reissues live up to that
brief admirably. West includes seventy pages of notes in addition to an
annotated text of Essay on Criticism, as well as a series of useful appendices.
These include: a full list of similes used in the poem, giving line numbers,
subjects, and the subject of the comparison; lists of passages, with glosses
where ‘the meaning is obscurely expressed’; a list of grammatical irregularities;
and a list of rhymes which have become faulty ‘owing to changes in
pronunciation’ (p. 162). All appendices are generously cross-referenced with
notes elsewhere, allowing easy navigation of a wealth of information relating
to the reading, and understanding, of the poem. There is a brief but helpful
chronology of Pope’s life and works, and an index. The lengthy introduction
glosses various aspects of Pope’s poetry and its contexts; the section entitled
‘Was Pope a Poet?’ ranges through a host of poetry published after Pope in
order to consider Pope’s legacy and reputation, though it becomes a broader
assessment of what might be considered poetry.
Thompson’s edition of the Essay on Man is also enormously helpful and
detailed, though the scholarly matter is less copious than in West’s text.
Thompson gives a shorter, but still illuminating, introduction to the poem,
exploring the publishing history of the original work in 1733 and 1734, and
notes its place in a larger planned scheme. The relationship between Pope and
Bolingbroke is glossed, and Thompson effectively demonstrates the collaborative origin of the poem’s philosophical ideas. Historical and political
contexts are considered, and poetic form, style, and allusions are all usefully
glossed. The ‘Analysis’ section features a helpful plot summary for each
epistle, and the notes are generous and clearly expressed. At £12.99 this would
seem very good value for money, though students will need to fork out a little
more for the Essay on Criticism, which is priced by CUP at £15.99.
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Launched in 2012, PalMac’s Pivot series allows scholars to publish work
which is ‘longer than a journal article, but shorter than a monograph’ in a
vastly accelerated timeframe, with publication, according to the publisher’s
website, occurring just twelve weeks after acceptance of the manuscript. This
sounds like an interesting innovation in scholarly publishing, though whether
readers (or libraries) consider the resulting books good value for money
remains to be seen. G. Douglas Atkins’s Alexander Pope’s Catholic Vision:
‘Slave To No Sect’ was published in 2013 in the Pivot series, but at £49 (plus
delivery) for 80 pages (including front and end matter), this seems a bit stiff.
The shorter format means there are significant changes from a ‘standard’
monograph—there is little room, for instance, for a full introduction—and
individual chapters look very different: each features an abstract in addition to
full publication and bibliographical details which has the unfortunate effect of
making each chapter look like an article download from Muse or JSTOR
rather than part of a monograph. There are, I think, consequences too for the
quality, or at least the type, of argument which can be made. Atkins in his
preface states that he is ‘not so much interested in persuading you as in
elucidating the poems of Alexander Pope’ (p. vi), which he certainly does, but
readers more used to the traditional format may find themselves wondering
what exactly is being argued here. For instance, Atkins describes Pope’s
abilities as ‘amazing’, his criticism as ‘magnificent’, and the Essay on Criticism
as ‘great’ (p. 13), but the purpose of looking at this poem remains unclear.
Elsewhere, each chapter seems to be atomized: Atkins considers the Essay on
Criticism at some length in chapter 1, but in chapter 3 the reader is told that by
1715 Pope ‘had already published an Essay on Criticism and The Rape of the
Lock, the former a brilliant coupling of poetry and critical commentary’
(p. 44), as if the previous discussion of the poem did not exist. This
atomization is eventually explicitly acknowledged, but not until chapter 4
(which is a mere two and a half pages long), by which time the reader is likely
to have become confused, or frustrated, or both, by the absence of a central
argument. It is difficult to determine on the basis of Atkins’s study alone
whether the problems identified here are inherent to this new publishing
format, which allows work to appear at what the publishers term its ‘natural
length’, or whether they are specific to this particular text. In either case,
readers may well find the usefulness of Atkins’s study of Pope’s poetry and
religious identity unfortunately limited.
Opening up Pope studies in 2013 into European contexts is an article by
John Guthrie on ‘Eighteenth-Century German Translations of Pope’s Poetry’
(PEGS 82[2013] 67–84), which explores German responses to Pope’s poetry
across the eighteenth century; according to Guthrie certain parts of Pope’s
poetical character proved more popular with German audiences than others:
‘Pope the pastoral poet, the satirist, the wit, or Pope the subversive oppositional poet, found less favour than Pope the ethical spokesman, the humanist,
and optimist’ (p. 68). In addition to glossing the history of translations of
Pope’s work into German (The Essay on Man was the poem translated most
often), Guthrie also demonstrates that the interest in British poetry generated
by the appearance of Pope’s poetry fed back in turn into developments in
German language and culture.
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Pope’s poetry also features in Paddy Bullard’s article on ‘The Scriblerian
Mock-Arts: Pseudo-Technical Satire in Swift and his Contemporaries’ (SP
110[2013] 611–36), alongside that of Swift, with some examples drawn from
other members of the circle. Bullard claims that the ‘mock-arts’ is a ‘sub-genre’
which deserves its ‘own small history, if only to make the catalogue of literary
kinds at a time of extraordinary generic change more complete’ (p. 615).
Bullard does not focus exclusively on poetry, nor does he look particularly
closely at the poetry he does include (Swift’s Rural Sports, John Gay’s Trivia,
and Pope’s ‘Peri Bathous: or Martinus Scriblerius his Treatise of the Art of
Sinking in Poetry’ are all discussed), but his essay neatly places the mock-arts
within the context of broader Scriblerian practices and cultures, as well as
within the contexts of individual Scriblerians’ careers.
Bullard appears again in 2013’s work as co-editor, with James McLaverty,
of a collection of essays on Jonathan Swift and the Eighteenth-Century Book.
The editors and many of the contributors are involved in the Cambridge
Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift, and this expertise is of considerable
benefit to the collection. Three essays, in addition to Bullard and McLaverty’s
introduction, are likely to be of interest to readers of this section. While the
introduction does not focus exclusively on poetry (far from it—Bullard and
McLaverty offer a richly contextualized account of Swift’s engagement with
books and the book trade across a range of forms), it does consider Swift’s
early forays as a poet in his 1691 Ode to the King, and provides a very detailed,
useful assessment of Swift’s career trajectory. Of more direct interest is
Stephen Karian’s essay on ‘Swift as a Manuscript Poet’ (pp. 31–50). Karian
claims that ‘we should regard Swift primarily as a manuscript-based poet’
instead of one writing ‘for print publication and its largely unknown
readership’, contending that this will enable ‘a greater awareness of Swift’s
complex and sometimes conflicting attitudes towards his own poetry’ (p. 31).
Karian’s discussion includes a helpful quantitative analysis of Swift’s oeuvre
from 1690 to 1733. Pat Rogers’s essay, ‘The Uses of the Miscellany: Swift,
Curll and Piracy’ (pp. 87–100), is also likely to appeal to readers of this
section, though, as Rogers himself notes, further work on Swift and
miscellanies is likely to benefit from the publication of the full Digital
Miscellanies, currently in development. However, Rogers argues convincingly
that greater attention needs to be paid to this aspect of Swift’s career because
‘Swift was known to his contemporaries as a miscellany author’ (p. 87). Swift’s
engagement with miscellanies is also the subject of James McLaverty’s
individual contribution, ‘George Faulkner and Swift’s Collected Works’ (pp.
154–75); the two essays together suggest that this will indeed, as Rogers claims,
be a fruitful area for Swift scholarship in the near future.
This year saw an increase in work on women’s poetry in the eighteenth
century, including a fine monograph by Gillian Wright, Producing Women’s
Poetry, 1600–1730: Text and Paratext, Manuscript and Print. Wright focuses
on five poets, two of whom will be of interest to readers here: Anne Finch and
Mary Monck. Wright’s central contention is that scholarship of women’s
poetry of the early modern period, from Virginia Woolf onwards, has failed to
take adequate account of ‘forms of . . . literary production which did not offer
opportunities for financial reward’ (pp. 5–6), which has led to the persistent
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‘downplaying’ (p. 6) of manuscript circulation and other forms that did not
yield payment. While Wright’s summary of extant scholarship (and its
weaknesses in this area) is perhaps a little over-long, she is consistently alert
to the dangers that have beset work on women writers (and which persist
in some of the other work on women poets covered in this section),
including focusing so heavily on ‘a woman writer’s biography, friendships or
textual relationships’ that the texts themselves are ‘scarcely addressed’ (p. 10).
Wright sees such scholarship as leading to the unintentional reinforcement
of ‘old-fashioned stereotypes which see early modern women’s writing as
valuable only as cultural history, incapable of sustaining formal or substantive
analysis’ (p. 10). Wright argues instead that ‘Literary production’ is a ‘complex
process in which women’s creative activities are inextricable’ from the material
and cultural realities and assumptions ‘that made those activities both possible
and visible’ (p. 14). The five poets (Anne Southwell, Anne Bradstreet, and
Katherine Philips in addition to Finch and Monck) examined here were
chosen, Wright states, because their poetry was collected, showing that
‘someone . . . cared enough about [their] poetry to gather, organise and
transcribe it’ (p. 13). Chapter 4 focuses on Anne Finch, who was ‘unusual’
among women writers of this period ‘in using both manuscript and print to
collect her own poetry’ (p. 146), though the role of Finch’s husband Heneage
in securing the transmission of his wife’s poetry to posterity is also examined in
detail. Chapter 5 looks at the much less well-known work of Mary Monck,
whose obscurity, Wright suggests, might be because of the lack of a fascinating
biography. Some sketching in of the life is necessary, despite the earlier caveats
about biographical criticism, in order to produce a ‘historically and textually
informed reading of Monck’s poems and translations’ (p. 197), which are
located largely in Marinda: Poems and Translations upon Several Occasions
[1716]. The focus on the texts themselves is less strong here than in earlier
chapters, however, perhaps because of the inclusion of quite considerable
amounts of biographical detail. Despite this, Wright’s study argues convincingly for the need for more scholarly attention to be paid to the texts, and less
to the lives, of the talented writers covered here.
The limitations of the biographical approach to literary criticism are
unfortunately evident in Poetic Sisters: Early Eighteenth-Century Women
Poets by Deborah Kennedy, which overlaps in part with Wright’s study.
Kennedy also chooses five poets, whom she deems ‘representative’ (p. 1),
though her five are Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Frances Seymour, countess of
Hertford, Sarah Dixon, Mary Jones, and Anne Finch. Each poet is given a
chapter. Kennedy seems less assured than Wright that the literary merit of
these writers will be understood, so she proposes to ‘explain in what ways they
excelled as poets and why they are worth reading today’ (p. 1). Wright takes it
for granted that the women poets she examines are ‘worth reading today’, and
it seems to me that more than thirty years after the revival of interest in
women’s writing, this is the more productive position to take. The sense that
Kennedy is involved in some sort of special pleading is heightened by the links
she makes between the ‘Poetic Sisters’ of her titles and other ‘notable’ sisters of
the twenty-first century, including the ‘fabulous Kardashians and the graceful
Middleton sisters’ (p. 2). That said, Kennedy’s attempt to secure the idea of a
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female literary tradition, especially one that is not divorced from the activities
of ‘ ‘‘brother’’ ’ poets (p. 3), is productive and likely to be a beneficial direction
for future studies of women’s writing. Kennedy also looks at an impressive
range of poetry by all five women, and quotes generously from that poetry—
perhaps too generously, given the excellence and ready availability of Roger
Lonsdale’s Women Poets of the Eighteenth Century (OUP [1989]). However,
the study seems uncertain whether it is aimed at an academic or a general
audience. Kennedy states that ‘This book seeks to find new readers for all five
of the poets discussed’ (p. 18), which would indicate a general audience is
envisaged, but the introduction sets it up as a book oriented more at an
academic readership, and a price tag of $90 (nearly £60) is likely to be beyond
most general readers. The biographical approach and lack of a central
argument make this study unlikely to appeal to an academic audience, but
general readers will be unlikely to afford the book, making it hard to see who
will make use of it.
While it is very pleasing to see women writers engaged with and discussed in
so many studies this year, it is frustrating that they are not always well treated.
Karen Green’s essay in Curtis-Wendlandt, Green, and Gibbard, eds., Political
Ideas of Enlightenment Women: Virtue and Citizenship, gets off to a bad start
by misnaming one of the two central figures in the title: ‘Catherine Macaulay
and Laetitia Barbauld [sic]: Two Eighteenth-Century ‘‘Republicans’’ ’ (pp.
157–72). Things do not get better, with Anna Laetitia Barbauld being called, at
various points, Laetitia Aiken (instead of Aikin), or just plain Laetitia (p. 161),
which is annoying in addition to being confusing. While it is easy to see the
value of comparing Macaulay and Barbauld as political writers, this essay does
not make a sustained comparison of their works, which seems a missed
opportunity. Barbauld’s poetry also fares poorly in Elizabeth Johnston’s essay
‘Looking into the Mirror, Inscribing the Blank Slate: Eighteenth-Century
Women Write about Mothering’ (in Florescu, ed., Disjointed Perspectives on
Motherhood, pp. 185–200). As with Kennedy and Green, Johnston opts for
biographical readings of the texts she considers, only in Barbauld’s case she is
unfortunately mistaken about that biography. Johnston’s essay begins with a
useful contextualization of theories of motherhood in the eighteenth century
through Locke and various conduct books which, she argues, ‘imagine women
as lacking independent subjectivity; childlike, they too are blank slates on
which their fathers and husbands may write their desires (p. 185). The strength
of Johnston’s article lies in the ways in which she argues how these ‘blank
slates’ write themselves into some sort of agency through authorship by
constructing a ‘narrative of self’ by which they can control ‘how others
interpret’ (p. 186). The weakness is in the uncritical conflation of speaker and
author, with most unfortunate consequences when looking at Barbauld’s ‘To a
Little Invisible Being Expected Soon to Become Visible’ in which, Johnston
claims, ‘Barbauld refers to her unborn child’ (p. 190), despite William
McCarthy demonstrating in his biography of Barbauld that the addressee was
in fact Frances Carr, the poet’s pregnant friend.
Elsewhere a host of women writers were considered in 2013 in a pleasing
array of contexts. Dustin D. Stewart’s essay on ‘Elizabeth Rowe, John Milton
and Poetic Change’ (WW 20[2013] 13–31) makes the intriguing claim for
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Rowe’s writing that she ‘speaks of souls and poems as if they share in the same
economy of salvation’, meaning that ‘when she envisions the soul’s escape
from its body, she also evokes the potential release of poetry from its current
state’ (p. 14). Stewart links this productively to politics and shifts in poetry
away from the ‘wits of Rochester’s ilk’ to something more elevated. The essay
concludes with a discussion of how Rowe works through what Stewart terms
a ‘Miltonic muddle’ when attempting to reconfigure ‘the relationship between
soul and sense, form and matter, and the upshots for literary practice’ (p. 26).
In the same issue is Alison Winch’s ‘ ‘‘Drinking a Dish of Tea with Sapho’’:
The Sexual Fantasies of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Lord Byron’ (WW
20[2013] 82–99), which looks at a range of Wortley Montagu’s writing in order
to trace its influence on Byron’s poetry. Winch notes that such admiration for
her work was ‘an exception in a period when her reputation was still suffering
from Alexander Pope’s and Horace Walpole’s virulent misogyny’ (p. 83), and
an examination of Byron’s liking for her is therefore useful in producing a
fuller account of the reception history of Wortley Montagu’s poetry.
This same issue supplies a further challenging essay, this one from Victoria
Joule, who offers a critical and searching examination of ‘matrilineal accounts’
(p. 33) of women’s literary heritage in ‘Feminist Foremother? The Maternal
Metaphor in Feminist Literary History and Delarivier Manley’s The Nine
Muses (1700)’ (WW 20[2013] 32–48). Joule argues convincingly for a much
messier, less cosy system of influence than those typically constructed by
critics. This reveals, Joule suggests, ‘a history of opportunism, self-motivation
and rivalry’ (p. 33), which does important work in holding to account critical
assumptions inherent in our current use, and selection, of literary mothers.
Deanna P. Koretsky’s essay on ‘Sarah Wesley, British Methodism, and the
Feminist Question, Again’ (ECS 46[2013] 223–37) also offers a revision of
women’s literary history by recovering Sarah Wesley’s writings, whose name,
Koretsky notes, is likely to be ‘unfamiliar to most scholars of the eighteenth
century’, and whose works are ‘almost wholly absent from most histories
of British Methodism’ (p. 223). Koretsky makes the case that Wesley was a
‘noteworthy poet and thinker’, and was a key contributor to ‘the emergence of
liberal feminism’ in this period (p. 223). The essay offers a useful historical,
cultural, and religious contextualization of Wesley’s works before giving a
helpful description of the extant manuscripts of her poetry; its argument that
Wesley has been overlooked because ‘she confounds existing paradigms of
the ‘‘woman writer’’ in her political, religious, and aesthetic affinities’ (p. 227),
is well made.
Anna Seward’s poetry is considered in terms of its production in a
provincial setting by JoEllen DeLucia, in an essay entitled ‘Local Poetry in the
Midlands: Francis Mundy’s Needwood Forest and Anna Seward’s Lichfield
Poems’, which appears in a most interesting collection of essays edited by Evan
Gottlieb and Juliet Shields, Representing Place in British Literature and
Culture, 1660–1830 (pp. 155–71). DeLucia’s essay argues that Seward’s poetry
should be more often explored as local poetry, and that understanding it in
this way would ‘provide a new lens through which’ to read her Lichfield poems
(p. 156). DeLucia also considers the ways in which poetry like Seward’s and
Mundy’s might be representative of a wider ‘decentralization’ of poetry and
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culture from London, which she links to the ‘less hierarchical definitions of
nation produced during this period’ (p. 158). Pleasingly DeLucia also pays
attention to the places themselves, and considers what Needwood Forest was
physically, culturally, and historically. This same technique pays dividends too
in Penny Fielding’s excellent essay in the same collection, ‘ ‘‘Usurpt by
Cyclops’’: Rivers, Industry, and Environment in Eighteenth-Century Poetry’
(pp. 139–54). Ranging through a variety of river poems, from John Wilson’s
Clyde [1767] to Anna Seward’s ‘Colebrook Dale’ [1790] to Wordsworth’s
Duddon sonnets, Fielding asserts that ‘The river has a distinct geography, one
that it draws from the localities through which it passes and (particularly in
the case of national poetry) the relations between such localities’ (p. 139). Her
argument that ‘The gradual industrialization of Britain in the eighteenth
century produces a new kind of self-consciousness about nature’ (p. 145) is
amply supported by the wealth of evidence marshalled here.
Published in the same collection as DeLucia’s and Fielding’s essays, Janet
Sorenson’s piece, ‘Local Languages: Obscurity and Open Secrets in Scots
Vernacular Poetry’ (pp. 47–63) engages not only with place but with an aspect
of eighteenth-century literary culture that proved particularly popular and
productive in 2013—the vernacular tradition in Scottish poetry. The combination of place and Scottish vernacular here leads to some intriguing claims,
including Sorenson’s assertion that the use of vernacular ‘would have
remained obscure even to Scots readers and the boundaries between locals
and those outside could never be confidently drawn’, leading to a poetry which
‘often exceeds or subverts a sense of place’ (p. 47). Sorenson looks at Allan
Ramsay’s 1724 Tea-Table Miscellany (the miscellany being another area of
increasing scholarly activity in our field), as well as the work of Robert
Fergusson and, venturing out of the remit of this section, James Hogg and
Robert Burns.
The man who helped Burns secure fame is the subject of David E.
Shuttleton’s essay ‘ ‘‘Nae Hottentots’’: Thomas Blacklock, Robert Burns, and
the Scottish Vernacular Revival’ (ECLife 37[2013] 21–50). Instead of looking
at Blacklock in terms of his championing of Burns, Shuttleton’s focus is on
Blacklock as a poet in his own right, and he argues that ‘Blacklock’s literary
career exemplifies’ what he calls a ‘pattern of interaction and intersection’
between Enlightenment ideals and the Scottish vernacular revival’ (p. 22).
Shuttleton helpfully glosses Blacklock’s life and varied career as poet, ‘literary
journalist, scholarly essayist, translator, song-writer and pedagogue’ (p. 24),
and includes as an appendix Blacklock’s poem, ‘To the Revd. Mr. Oliver on
Receiving a Collection of Scots Poems from Him. An Epistle’, composed in
1767 but not published in Blacklock’s lifetime. Shuttleton here provides an
important revision of the standard literary history.
Katherine Campbell and Kirsteen McCue also explore Scottish vernacular
poetry in their essay ‘Lowland Song Culture in the Eighteenth Century’
(in Dunnigan and Gilbert, eds., The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish
Traditional Literatures, pp. 94–104). They too look at Burns, in company
with Allan Ramsay and John Skinner, who together are ‘three of the most
important songwriters of the eighteenth century’ (p. 94). Campbell and McCue
aim to explore ‘how complex the process of movement from oral tradition to
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published tradition could be’ (p. 94). While this is not in itself a radically new
position to take (and indeed it overlaps with other work covered in this section
in this and previous years), the essay includes the music and lyrics for some of
the songs under discussion, which is not typical and which neatly supports
the authors’ argument about the reuse of traditional motifs from older
ballads, which they state is ‘often of crucial importance in maintaining the
links between old and new, ancient and modern, oral and printed song’ (p. 98).
Adam Fox’s essay, ‘Approaches to Ephemera: Scottish Broadsides, 1679–
1746’ (in Murphy and O’Driscoll, eds., Studies in Ephemera: Text and Image in
Eighteenth-Century Print, pp. 117–41), explores related territory, and usefully
adds to the wealth of work on the subject of Scottish oral/literary culture
published this year. There are clear links between Fox’s work and Campbell’s
and McCue’s; Fox too emphasizes the importance of considering music when
examining forms like broadsides, noting that ‘unless we can recover their tunes
and the way in which they were performed we lose the very essence of what
gave them form and meaning to contemporaries’ (p. 117). That said, Fox is
keen to stress the ‘literary qualities and language’ of broadsides, and argues
that, while their creators ‘were not always figures deemed to be of the first
rank, they comprise an important part of the literary culture of the time’
(p. 118). Taken together the various works on Scottish ballad and broadside
culture in 2013 would seem to validate Fox’s claims here.
Fox’s essay appears in a collection of essays a-swim with articles likely to be
of interest to readers of this section, especially those interested in what
constitutes literary culture, or literariness, in the poetry of this period. These
are questions asked by Paula McDowell in her excellent chapter, ‘Of Grubs
and Other Insects: Constructing the Categories of ‘‘Ephemera’’ and
‘‘Literature’’ in Eighteenth-Century British Writing’ (pp. 31–53), who argues
that ‘The category ‘‘ephemera,’’ like the category ‘‘Literature,’’ is not transparent, timeless, or universal, but a classification existing in history, that has
done and continues to do powerful rhetorical, practical, ideological, and
disciplinary work’ (p. 32). McDowell looks at the poetry of Pope and Swift
(through The Dunciad and A Tale of a Tub respectively), and argues that these
two writers were ‘deeply invested in constructing a distinction between
‘‘ephemeral’’ and ‘‘enduring’’ works’ (p. 37). While not exclusively on poetry,
this essay is likely to be interesting reading for scholars of eighteenth-century
verse, especially if they use resources like ECCO, which McDowell suggests
might finally collapse the boundaries between ‘ephemera’ and ‘literature’.
The digital context exercises Patricia Fumerton in her essay in the same
collection, ‘Digitizing Ephemera and its Discontents: EBBA’s Quest to
Capture the Protean Broadside Ballad’ (pp. 55–97), though Fumerton’s
discussion is informed by practice, as director of the English Broadside Ballad
Archive. The article is not about poetry per se, but considers at length the
practical issues of digitizing a genre of poetry and that genre’s place in literary
culture of the period. As with Fox and Campbell and McCue, Fumerton is
concerned to retain the links between broadsides and music, and the project
described here has a robust methodology for ensuring researchers can access
both literary and musical versions (p. 59). This essay is useful not only for
poetry scholars, but also for anyone considering a digital edition or an archive
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of complex material as Fumerton gives considerable detail about the rationale
behind decisions, as well as summaries of techniques used.
Ruth Perry begins her essay, ‘What Gets Printed from Oral Tradition: Anna
Gordon’s Ephemeral Ballads’ (also in Murphy and O’Driscoll, eds., pp. 99–
116) with Samuel Johnson, ‘who never liked music’ and satirized those who
collected things like broadside ballads (p. 99), which makes an interesting
counterpoint to the earlier essays. Perry’s focus is Anna Gordon, who gathered
‘the earliest oral repertoire to be so collected’ (p. 100), though this extends to
consider more modern collecting and scholarship on the ballad. There is some
confusion about Anna Gordon’s name, which makes it difficult at times to
follow the discussion—three different versions (Anna Gordon; Anna Gordon
Brown; Anna Brown) appear in the same paragraph at one point. However,
Perry’s decision to provide URLs for song versions of some of the ballads
quoted is very helpful, and adds to the work being done by many of the other
scholars examined here. ‘From ‘‘The Easter Wedding’’ to ‘‘The Frantick
Lover’’: The Repeated Woodcut and Its Shifting Roles’, by Theodore Barrow
(in Murphy and O’Driscoll, eds., pp. 219–39), shifts the emphasis from the oral
(and aural) to the visual. Barrow argues that woodcuts ‘operate in dialogue
with the text in order to produce meaning for a broad range of readers’ (p.
219), and that they functioned in part as ‘narrative devices for the unlettered’
(p. 220). For Barrow this broadens out the role of ‘creator of meaning’ from
the author/reader to include the printer, as ‘Analysis of these images shows
that they have a much closer and more dynamic relationship to the ballads
than previously thought’ (p. 220). Generous illustrations assist Barrow’s
discussion.
Ballad collection and culture are the subjects also of Eva Axer’s essay on
the relationship between English and German ballads, ‘ ‘‘Effusions of
Nature’’—‘‘Samenkörner de Nation’’: The Politics of Memory in Percy’s
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry and Herder’s Volkslieder’ (GL&L 66[2013]
388–401), which aims to ‘compare two of the most important and influential
English and German collections’ of the period (p. 389). Axer outlines a
tradition of influence through the acceptance of the ballad as a legitimate
form, first in England ‘and subsequently in Germany’ (p. 389), and gestures
helpfully to subsequent developments in the ballad tradition in both countries.
Also published this year was Philip Gould’s handsome book, Writing the
Rebellion: Loyalists and the Literature of Politics in British America, which
considers loyalist poetic responses to the American War of Independence.
Many of the texts discussed here had a presence on both sides of the Atlantic,
though, Gould contends, their critical neglect has distorted ideas of the nature
of literary culture in the American colonies at this time: ‘the most prominent
features of Loyalist poetics—its separation of virtue from politics, its uncertain
view of the elasticity of language, its parochial view of an immediate
audience—are not commensurate with the critical rubrics that have traditionally shaped literary and cultural studies of the American Revolution’ (p. 5).
Gould sets about correcting these rubrics by exploring a range of loyalist
poetry; in addition he takes issue with the notion that ‘patriotic discourse’ is
assumed to mean American, rather than loyalist (p. 7), which lends
considerable energy to the discussion. So too does Gould’s interest in print
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culture and the literary and cultural exchange between the colonies and Britain
which Gould shows was very important to both regions. Print businesses
engaged in these exchanges ‘imagined America . . . as another Scotland or
Ireland where they could elude copyright restrictions and capitalize on the
reprint trade of English books’ (p. 25). Throughout, Gould comments on the
relationship between loyalist literature and English literary models, which
enables fruitful comparisons to be made between writers such as James
Thomson and Edward Young and the much lesser-known colonial writers.
Adam Rounce offers in his monograph, Fame and Failure 1720–1800: The
Unfulfilled Literary Life, a ‘survey of literary failure’ (p. 2). His choice of
subjects is at times curious, including as it does some names which would
ordinarily be considered literary successes, such as Anna Seward, the subject
of Rounce’s third chapter. The individuals in Rounce’s study revolve around
Samuel Johnson, who is presented as a touchstone of literary success ‘against
very considerable odds’ (p. 8), and against whom the others are compared.
It provides pleasing symmetry (as well as complexity) that Johnson was
involved in the careers of all the literary ‘failures’ examined here. The study is
not exclusively about poetry, but it features frequently. In chapter 1, for
example, the early pro-Jacobite poetry of Richard Savage is discussed, with
Rounce arguing that his literary failure arose from an overweaning ‘selfconfidence in his own poetic and aristocratic righteousness’ which had
‘disastrous results’ for his literary career (pp. 40–1). Dr William Dodd’s poetry
tests Rounce’s powers of description, being neither ‘contemptible’ nor
‘bathetic’, but ‘neither is it memorable’ (p. 72). Dodd’s Thoughts in Prison
[1777] is discussed at some length. Rounce’s claims about Seward might prove
the most contentious; he describes her as ‘a notable example of the unfulfilled
literary life’ (p. 110), and uses some rather unconvincing biographical criticism
of her work to support this claim. This lapse is a shame, because generally this
is an intriguing and novel study of authors and authorship in this period, likely
to be of considerable interest to literary scholars of all stripes.
Jean-Paul Forster’s monograph, Eighteenth-Century Geography and
Representations of Space in English Fiction and Poetry, despite its promising
title, has only one chapter of interest to readers of this section, chapter 4, ‘The
Emergence of the Rambler in English Literature’. Forster selects here a range
of topographical poetry, including The Seasons, ‘Grongar Hill’, The Deserted
Village, and The Task, and uses these texts to consider how ‘The walk in space
becomes a walk in the past, a past happier than the present’ (p. 168). Despite
clear overlaps with Rebecca Solnit’s 2002 book Wanderlust, Solnit is not cited,
and nor are Anne D. Wallace or Robin Jarvis; the book has no bibliography,
so it is difficult to tell what has been consulted, or not. Readers might also find
the layout of the notes intrusive, with little by way of a gap or other separation
between the main body of the text and the footnotes.
A rather more substantial treatment of poetry is offered in Eric Parisot’s
quite excellent Graveyard Poetry: Religion, Aesthetics and the Mid-EighteenthCentury Poetic Condition, which builds on work published by Parisot in the
last couple of years and reviewed in this section. His study starts with a useful
gloss of the looseness of the term ‘graveyard poetry’ which, for Parisot,
denotes ‘a rather loose conglomeration of British poetry’ written in the first
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half of the century (p. 1). A useful gloss of the term’s history is offered; also
filled in for the reader are the literary traditions that underpin graveyard
poetry: Milton features prominently. After a thorough review of the extant
literature, and its limitations, Parisot gets down to business, declaring quite
forcefully that ‘If we are unable to formulate a modern aesthetic code to judge
and read graveyard poetry, then it is both timely and valid to reconsider what
code eighteenth-century readers employed’ (p. 5). Six chapters follow, the first
two of which are devoted to uncovering the religious and cultural contexts for
the rise of graveyard poetry as a popular form. The first chapter considers the
Protestant tradition in Britain via Locke, and shifting attitudes to scriptural
authority in the period. Parisot argues that there was a reciprocal relationship
between religion and poetry which benefited both: ‘With the Scriptures
reconstituted as poetry and revived as an authority on cultural rather than
theological grounds, poetry itself, by corollary, assumes an autonomous
authority by virtue of its significance and relevance to human lives’ (p. 26).
Chapter 2 turns to graveyard poetry itself by looking at Parnell’s ‘Night-Piece
on Death’ and Young’s Night Thoughts, which are considered alongside
Dodsley’s Art of Preaching. In the subsequent chapters poetry by Thomas
Foxton, Anne Finch, Matthew Green, John Reynolds, Elizabeth Rowe,
Thomas Gray, and William Broome, amongst others, is considered, which
contributes to a thorough and illuminating discussion of this genre which will
no doubt considerably advance our understanding of graveyard poetry and its
roles in eighteenth-century culture.
Richard Morton takes us back to earlier eighteenth-century poetic concerns
in his monograph, The English Enlightenment Reads Ovid: Dryden and Jacob
Tonson’s 1717 Metamorphoses. Despite a difficult page layout, where many
different parts of the textual matter compete for attention, Morton offers a
detailed and careful description of the complicated publishing history of
Dryden’s, and rival, translations of classical texts in what Morton claims
constituted ‘publishing wars’ (p. xiv). The involvement of both the Whig
Kit-Cats and the Tory Scriblerians in the Garth edition is considered, and
Morton also looks at some of Pope’s squibs on the subject. Each chapter
examines a different aspect of the publication history of translations, with
chapter 1 centred on the history of Ovidian translation into English from the
Renaissance period into the eighteenth century. Throughout, Morton is alert
to issues inherent in translation, and this adds wider value to the book’s
detailed, often quite technical, discussion of individual writers and their works.
In chapter 2 Morton turns to Sir Samuel Garth’s involvement in producing a
‘complete’ English edition of Metamorphoses, with much of the discussion
centred on Dryden’s contributions. The third chapter looks at the work of
Addison, Gray, Pope, and Tate; Morton assesses the quality of each
translator’s efforts. This pattern is repeated for other collaborators in later
chapters, and it is pleasing to see lesser-known names accorded as much
attention as the Scriblerian ‘stars’: indeed, Morton’s assessment is that ‘there
are no patently weak links in Garth’s Metamorphoses, the sensibilities of the
various translations [being] remarkably consistent’ (p. 140). This is a fine
account of what was certainly an extraordinary collaborative project across
many years and more than one generation of writers in the eighteenth century.
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The range of subjects explored in the essays, chapters, and articles published
in 2013 was exciting. Rosalind Powell used Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical
Enquiry as a parallel text through which to examine the poetry of Christopher
Smart in ‘Towards a New Language: Sublime Aesthetics in Smart’s Jubilate
Agno’ (in Regan, ed., pp. 113–30). While acknowledging the difficulties of
ascertaining whether Smart ‘might have been directly influenced’ by Burke’s
text, Powell argues that it is still productive to ‘consider Smart’s reaction
against the idea of the sublime as represented by authors such as Burke’
(p. 115). Readers may be sceptical about the strength of the link drawn
between Burke specifically and Smart, but Powell’s use of the sublime, especially what she calls the ‘religious sublime’, to look at Smart’s poetry is
productive. Marcus Walsh also looks at Smart’s poetry in his essay,
‘Eighteenth-Century High Lyric: William Collins and Christopher Smart’ (in
Thain, ed., The Lyric Poem: Formations and Transformations, pp. 112–34).
Walsh begins with an overview of the types of lyric poem which thrived in the
eighteenth-century. The crux of his discussion is an exploration of ‘the attempt
in the middle decades of the century to find . . . a credible way of writing an
imaginative high lyric poetry that might assume a prominent position in the
national literary culture’ (p. 112). Walsh goes back to the classical antecedents
of the lyric through to Cowley, Dryden, and Congreve; the value of Walsh’s
essay lies, for me, in the ways in which he weaves together this cultural and
literary history with detailed and technical analysis of eighteenth-century lyric
poems, tracing a clear line of poetic development, though his description of
Smart (who was, amongst other things, a ‘bankrupt’, a ‘transvestite’, a
‘children’s writer’, and a ‘drunk’ (p. 122)), is most entertaining. This is a very
learned, engaging essay.
Joining Walsh with an essay in The Lyric Poem is David Fairer, whose topic
is ‘Modulation and Expression in the Lyric Ode’ (pp. 92–111). Fairer explores
‘the tricky borderline between verbal text and music/sound’, and argues that
‘poets, acknowledging the ancient roots of lyric in the lyre, were aware of a
defining expressiveness in lyric verse and of an interplay of technical skill and
audience response’ (p. 93). Dryden, Akenside, Collins, and Anne Finch all
feature, and Fairer offers an intriguing argument about how the ‘ability of
the lyricist simultaneously to convey an emotion and to arouse it takes us to the
heart of the complex notion of expressiveness, which at this period brought the
arts of poetry and music together’ (p. 101).
Michael Genovese also considers a single poetic form in his essay, ‘An
Organic Commerce: Sociable Selfhood in Eighteenth-Century Georgic’ (ECS
46[2013] 197–221). His piece begins with the question, ‘what kind of labor [do]
writers like Dryden undertake—and what kind of cultural work [do] they carry
out—when they translate fieldwork into poetry?’ (p. 197), which Genovese
links to national concerns. Several well-known georgic poems are drawn on to
answer the main question, including Philip’s Cyder, Smart’s The Hop-Garden,
Dodsley’s Public Virtue: Agriculture, and Dyer’s The Fleece which, Genovese
argues, ‘contest the capitalistic insistence on private gain by stressing that
sympathetic and economic connectivity determines every stage of the productive process’ (p. 199).
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Declan William Kavanagh’s essay, ‘ ‘‘Of neuter gender, tho’ of Irish
growth’’: Charles Churchill’s Fribble’ (IUR 43[2013] 119–30), focuses on
Churchill’s verse satire The Rosciad [1761] as a way to consider the ‘queer
historical considerations of the conflation of xenophobia with effeminophobia
in colonial imaginings of Ireland’ (p. 119). Churchill’s attacks on the Irish
actor Thady Fitzpatrick contrasted his effeminacy with the supposed
‘manliness’ of David Garrick.
Showing no consideration for the section boundaries at YWES, Brett
D. Wilson’s essay looks at ‘Hannah More’s Slavery and James Thomson’s
Liberty: Fond Links, Mad Liberty, and Unfeeling Bondage’ (in Swaminathan
and Beach, eds., pp. 93–111). Despite the divisional inconvenience, Wilson
makes a compelling case for considering the overlaps between concepts of
‘slavery’ and ‘liberty’ at two very different points in the eighteenth century: not
paying close attention to these terms risks ‘misprision of the stakes in
antislavery as a nationalist idiom and sensibility as a basis for political
commonality’ (p. 93). Of particular interest to Wilson is the apparently deliberate misattribution of Hannah More’s epigraph to Thomson’s Liberty, when
it really came from ‘Winter’ in The Seasons; the second half of the essay is
largely dedicated to exploring More’s motivations.
‘A ‘‘Body Unfitt’’: Daniel Defoe in the Pillory and the Resurrection of the
Versifying Self’, by Andreas K.E. Mueller (ECent 54[2013] 393–407), proved
particularly illuminating. Mueller argues here that, while the effects of Defoe’s
experiences in the pillory on the trajectory of his literary career have been
noted, there has been ‘comparatively little attention . . . paid to Defoe’s
authorial self-representation immediately before and after his time in the
pillory’ (p. 394). Mueller explores this through several poems which he argues
have direct links to Defoe’s experiences, including ‘An Elegy on the Author
of the True-Born Englishman’ [1704], A Hymn to the Pillory [1803], and ‘The
Storm’, and argues that Defoe’s speakers are able to distance the physical
suffering of the body from the supposedly transgressive organ, the mind.
Several essays offered surveys of larger concepts as explored through
eighteenth-century literary culture, including poetry. Ros Ballaster’s essay
‘ ‘‘Heart-easing mirth’’: Charm in the Eighteenth Century’ (EIC 63[2013]
249–74) takes a century-long view of the shifting uses and understanding of
‘charm’ in the period, moving between the poetry of the 1630s to the 1790s.
The result is a wide-ranging cultural history of charm which considers other
artistic forms, such as masques and other hybrid genres alongside poetry.
Mark Akenside’s The Pleasures of Imagination is examined in greatest depth,
but Milton, Robert Graves, and Matthew Prior also feature. Ballaster charts
interesting parallels between ‘low’ and ‘high’ literary forms, arguing that in the
ballad ‘the charm carries all the potency of the dangerous witchcraft with
which it is associated in the medieval and early modern periods. It is also—as
in the more decorous and elevated verse of Milton and Akenside—an action
associated with the poem itself’ (p. 261).
Anne Milne also takes a broad view of the period, in her case in relation to
‘The Power of Testimony: The Speaking Animal’s Plea for Understanding in
a Selection of Eighteenth-Century British Poetry’ (in DeMello, ed., Speaking
for Animals: Animal Autobiographical Writing, pp. 163–77). Poems selected
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4. Drama
Missing from last year’s eighteenth-century drama section was Shakespeare in
the Eighteenth Century, edited by Fiona Ritchie and Peter Sabor: it was
reviewed in Chapter VI, ‘Shakespeare’, and under ‘The Novel’ in Chapter XI.
However, the collection includes three important chapters for this section,
which are worth noting: chapter 7, Tiffany Stern’s ‘Shakespeare in Drama’;
chapter 8, Robert Shaughnessy’s ‘Shakespeare and the London Stage’; and
chapter 9, Jenny Davidson’s ‘Shakespeare Adaptation’. Stern examines
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include Anna Barbauld’s ‘The Mouse’s Petition’ and Anna Seward’s ‘An Old
Cat’s Dying Soliloquy’. The essay is interested in exploring how ‘some of the
reluctance and resistance to acknowledgements of animal subjectivity can be
located in the ways in which humans simultaneously create and interpret the
autobiographical animal’ (p. 164), and Milne offers an eloquent demolition
of pat critical assessments of Barbauld’s poetry especially, which represent
the animal as ‘open, like a text, for easy human reconstruction and reading’
(p. 167).
Louise Jay’s focus is on representations of the passions in ‘From Passion to
Affection: The Art of the Philosophical in Eighteenth-Century Poetics’ (P&L
37[2013] 72–87), and points to some interesting differences between the
‘desirability of calm, enduring affections over wayward, fleeting passions in
eighteenth-century moral philosophical treatises’, and the ways in which ‘the
virtues of passion are loudly extolled’ in ‘literary theoretical treatises’ (p. 73).
Jay’s subjects include James Beattie, John Dennis, and Joseph Priestley.
Rounding off this year’s review of scholarship on poetry is David A.
Brewer’s challenging and provocative essay, ‘The Tactility of Authorial
Names’ (ECent 54[2013] 195–213). As the title indicates this is not exclusively
about poetry, but there is a good deal of food for thought for scholars of
any kind of eighteenth-century literature. Brewer considers John Cleland,
Charles Churchill, Isaac Teale, and Laurence Sterne, and argues that authors
were understood in this period to be ‘types, offices, personifications’, a series
of ‘conditions’ rather than individual people, and that these ‘conditions’ were
not specific to any particular person (p. 196). Teale’s poem The Sable Venus
[1765] is one of the texts subjected to closer analysis. Brewer’s claims for his
essay are not modest: its findings run ‘counter to all of our big, thick, standard
biographies, not to mention our assorted projects of identity-politics-driven
recovery, and perhaps our default conception of the humanities more
generally’ (pp. 195–6). Anticipating challenges to these assertions, Brewer
states that he thinks his results are ‘nonetheless true’, and better explain ‘most
of the surviving evidence’ (p. 196). Whether the scholarly community agrees
with him remains to be seen, but Brewer’s essay is, at the very least, thoughtprovoking and challenging, and the relaxed, confident style certainly helps
to persuade the reader. Brewer is generous in his acknowledgements too,
which make apparent the essay’s origins in real scholarly sociability, and
help position this essay as one of the highlights of the scholarship produced
this year.
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Shakespeare’s popular and literary appeal across the eighteenth century,
beginning with David Garrick’s admiration for Shakespeare and his treatment
of Shakespeare’s works as a ‘talisman’ (p. 141). What differentiates Stern’s
chapter from other criticism is that she also examines adaptations of adaptions
in the eighteenth century, such as puppet shows and shortened versions of
Shakespeare’s works that were interspersed with dancing or fireworks.
Moreover, as Stern points out, Shakespeare was ‘assimilated through the
process of adapting his adaptations: his staged works were always current, and
that was because they were always substantially eighteenth century’ (p. 142).
She concludes with the assertion that eighteenth-century Shakespeare, or
perhaps Shakespeare of the age of Garrick, was relevant for its time, if not
for any other age (p. 155).
Robert Shaughnessy’s chapter also begins with a discussion about Garrick,
this time his 1747 London season. Shaughnessy examines Garrick’s prologue
for The Merchant of Venice, which heralded a new beginning for Drury Lane
Theatre after years of ‘mismanagement, financial chaos and malpractice’
(p. 162). Shaughnessy acknowledges that the resurgence of Shakespeare was
not solely due to the work of Garrick, and he notes the impact of the 1737
Licensing Act, as well as William Davenant’s and Thomas Killigrew’s place
in the revival in late seventeenth-century productions, albeit revisions of
Shakespeare’s plays augmented with ‘song and dance, opportunities for
spectacle, and supplemented or supplementary parts for the Kings’ and Dukes’
companies’ actresses’ (p. 169) to make them commercially viable. However, as
Shaughnessy points out, apart from ‘a handful of exceptions, Shakespeare’s
plays during the first three decades of the eighteenth century were neither
prominent nor especially popular’ (p. 170). Interestingly, Shaughnessy
discusses the role of wigs in Garrick’s productions, stating that ‘Garrick’s
head-piece was one of the signs that the Shakespearean and other characters
he portrayed, were his and his audiences’ contemporaries’ (p. 176). Finally,
Shaughnessy ends his chapter with a discussion of the major female actresses,
such as Hannah Pritchard and Peg Woffington, who paved the way for Sarah
Siddons.
Jenny Davidson’s chapter, ‘Shakespeare Adaptation’, discusses Nahum
Tate’s adaptation of King Lear [1761] and its happy ending, as well as
adaptations of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Richard III. Davidson argues
that, despite a long history of criticism that has disparaged these adaptations
(a term that she challenges), ‘stage adaptation cannot be thought of merely in
terms of aesthetic or the appropriative’ (p. 190); rather, these should be read as
productions of their time. Davidson further suggests that when discussing
Cibber’s Richard III the use of the word ‘appropriation’ is both inadequate
and reductive, and argues that the word ‘interpretation’ would be more
appropriate, as it takes into account the creativity of actor-managers with their
staging, costumes, etc., and ‘whatever cuts were deemed necessary to suit the
play to that year’s customs and constraints.’ (p. 200).
Shakespeare and two of the most influential eighteenth-century dramatists/
actors/managers, Colley Cibber and David Garrick, dominate this year’s
scholarship. First is Michael Caines’s Shakespeare and the Eighteenth Century,
part of the Oxford Shakespeare Topics series, aimed at teachers and students.
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Caines’s structure is largely chronological and the book is organized into nine
chapters: ‘Cibber’s Richard III, Rowe’s Works’, ‘Pope versus Theobald’,
‘Macklin’s Shylock, Shakespeare’s Statue’, ‘Garrick’, ‘Johnson’s Plays,
Garrick’s Jubilee’, ‘As Shakespeare Says’, ‘Shakespeare Abroad’, ‘Unreal
‘‘Shakespeare’’ ’, and ‘Shakespeare for Some Time’. There is also a useful
appendix providing a ‘chronology of selected eighteenth-century editions of
Shakespeare, critical studies, theatrical productions, and related events’.
Caines distils and contributes to the ongoing debates about eighteenth-century
reworkings, adaptations, staging, and appropriations of Shakespeare, stating
that it is essential to consider the relationship between Shakespeare and the
eighteenth century ‘to assess how the past shapes the present—and how the
present reshapes the past’ (p. xiii). In his monograph, Caines examines whether
the transformation of Shakespeare’s works was ‘gradual [or] played out
through a series of key moments’ (p. xix). The most relevant chapters for this
review section are chapters 1, 4, 5, and 6. Chapter 1 examines Colley Cibber’s
portrayal of Richard III, a part that he would play for over forty years. Caines
demonstrates that Cibber’s ‘blustering Richard III is nothing like the original,
Shakespeare’s Richard III’ (p. 2). Mirroring other critical works on
Shakespeare in the eighteenth century, Caines points out that it was ‘unlikely
that Cibber expected Shakespeare’s name to be a superior selling point in 1700’
(p. 3). However Caine’s suggestion that ‘in all probability, no play of
Shakespeare’s was performed in the seventeenth century with the playwright’s
name attached’ (p. 3) is an interesting one, particularly when pairing it with his
later statement that Cibber ‘was therefore committing no textual sin by
reworking Richard III so drastically, but improving it, as best he could, to suit
contemporary ideals’ (p. 5), which demonstrates that Shakespeare was not
held in the same awe and reverence that was apparent with later actormanagers such as Garrick. Caines also examines Garrick’s role in the
modernization of theatre—the naturalization of acting, removing spectators
from the stage, introducing new lighting techniques, and ‘embracing a
patriotic culture in which Shakespeare was an important prop, as in the
epilogue he wrote for Hannah Pritchard to deliver at the end of her last
performance in 1786’ (p. 93). Finally, as Caines asserts, ‘Shakespeare can also
serve as a means of reconsidering some of our own assumptions about
studying, celebrating, and restaging his works’ (p. 162).
Paul Prescott’s Reviewing Shakespeare: Journalism and Performance from
the Eighteenth Century to the Present is the first book-length examination of
the relationship between reviews of Shakespearian performances and the
productions themselves. Prescott’s premise is that newspaper reviews ‘have
played a key role in the collective experience of theatre going and theatre
talking’ (p. 4). Prescott begins his study in the 1740s and therefore chapter 1,
‘An Introduction to the Night-Watch Constable’, and chapter 2, ‘Tradition
and the Individual Talent: Reviewing the Macbeth Actor c.1740s–1890s’, are
relevant for this section, as theatre reviews were part of reception and social
discourse by the mid-eighteenth century. However, because of the vast
quantity of material available for research, Prescott has necessarily narrowed
his focus to performances and productions in London. Chapter 2 concentrates
on actors who played Macbeth between the 1740s and 1890s, beginning with
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Garrick’s Macbeth, which ‘marks a crucial moment in the performance history
of that play’ (p. 31). Situating his argument in a framework that examines
the many different performances of the same character demonstrates, as
Prescott suggests, that ‘the reputations of performers and performances have a
marked tendency to ossify’ (p. 32). Moreover, Prescott demonstrates that the
narratives that perpetuate the idea that the role of Macbeth is the most
notorious and trickiest of all stage roles ‘can be found in reviews and
performances from Garrick’s time to the present day’ (pp. 32–3). Prescott
shows that, despite this continuing myth that Garrick ‘achieved the status of a
benchmark against which all competitors would be judged’ in the role that he
was most famous for (p. 39), he was eventually replaced in popular esteem by
Edward Kemble.
Continuing with actor-managers, Elaine McGirr’s ‘Rethinking Reform
Comedies: Colley Cibber’s Desiring Women’ (ECS 46[2013] 385–97) examines
one of the most performed playwrights of the eighteenth century, Colley
Cibber, and his ‘reform comedies such as Love’s Last Shift [1696], Love Makes
a Man [1701], She Wou’d and She Wou’d Not [1702], The Careless Husband
[1704], The Double-Gallant [1707], The Lady’s Last Stake [1707], The NonJuror [1717], and The Provok’d Husband [1728], ‘repertory staples well into the
nineteenth century’ (p. 385). McGirr’s aim is to examine the plays themselves
rather than to use them as a vehicle for understanding eighteenth-century
society. McGirr takes as her starting point the idea of the reform comedy
which was one of the dominant genres in the early eighteenth century. She
suggests that, although a number of writers such as Susannah Centlivre, John
Vanbrugh, George Farquhar, and Mary Pix, all wrote reform comedies, ‘the
form was largely created—and certainly perfected—by Cibber’ (p. 386).
McGirr challenges past critical engagement with the genre as it ‘constructs a
skewed image of the theatre’s continued importance and influence in the
cultural marketplace’ (p. 386). Important for McGirr is the recognition of
reform comedies as a ‘powerful representation of women as desiring and active
agents’ (p. 386). Here McGirr challenges Allardyce Nicoll’s 1920s assertions
that have been ‘repeated with little alteration by succeeding generations of
literary and theatrical scholars up to the present day’ (p. 386), which define
these plays as early sentimental comedies. McGirr suggests that ‘Reform
comedies are comedies of manners, specifically comedies of bad—but
fashionable—manners . . . [which] offer satiric and often scathing portraits of
faulty behaviour and demand that audiences laugh it out of fashion’ (p. 386).
Therefore Cibber not only criticizes society, he also ‘takes great pains to
dramatize the faulty nature of contemporary fashions in both dress and
behaviour, giving his fops not only the most excessively fashionable and
therefore faulty dress sense, but also the most fashionable yet misguided social
mores’ (p. 387). As McGirr points out, Cibber ‘did not want his audiences to
feel; he wanted them to act, and to act differently’ (p. 387). McGirr goes on to
suggest that Cibber’s ‘satiric targets, the fashionable vices and vicious
characters of the beau monde, are refashioned as either ridiculous or tragic’
(p. 388). The role of the playwright, like that of the engraver and satirical
press, was to comment ‘on fashionable foibles, work to reform tastes’ (p. 388).
Cibber’s plays therefore ‘offer an astute and challenging commentary on the
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performability of social roles and personal identity’ (p. 388). Also important to
McGirr is the notion that reform comedies like Cibber’s and Vanbrugh’s
‘dramatize the importance of female desire to female virtue’ (p. 395). As
McGirr states, ‘Female virtue is not a passive quality, not an absence of
passion: these plays argue that without desire, there can be no virtue’ (p. 395).
Robert D. Hume’s ‘London in Comedy from Michaelmas Term to The
Beggar’s Opera’ (MLQ 74[2013] 331–62) also discusses comedy. Hume states
that between ‘circa 1600 and the Licensing Act of 1737 more than 250 English
comedies written for professional production were set in London’ (p. 331) and
questions whether ‘London can serve any of several radically different
dramaturgical and ideological purposes’ (p. 331). He outlines four difficulties
in his determination: first, ‘deciding what counts as a London comedy can be
trickier than one might imagine’; second, ‘setting may be variously conveyed in
both print and performance’; third ‘the meaning of London depends crucially
on our assumptions about the values brought to playhouse or text by spectator
or reader’; and finally, ‘settings in these plays are often arbitrary or pro forma.
A great many comedies carry out essentially formulaic plot actions against
backdrops that have little or no particularized significance’ (p. 333). Hume
acknowledges that many of the settings, such as Pall Mall, appear ‘to be little
more than the pleasure of recognition for audience members who frequented
these spots’ (p. 336). However, Hume also examines the satirical nature of
London-based comedies such as Vanbrugh’s Provok’d Wife [1697] and
Congreve’s Way of the World [1700], arguing that the ‘plays surveyed as
social satire differ enormously but have in common a dominant negativity’
(p. 344), while those plays which Hume suggests have ‘ideological argumentation’ (p. 345), such as Shadwell’s Squire of Alsatia [1688] or Thomas
Southerne’s Wives Excuse [1691], are more detached and ironic. Finally, Hume
suggests that ‘a few of the best plays are more internally conflicted than the
critics have realized’ (p. 359).
On a different note, Ana Elena González-Treviño’s ‘ ‘‘Kings and Their
Crowns’’: Signs of Monarchy and the Spectacle of New World Otherness
in Heroic Drama and Public Pageantry’ (SECC 42[2013] 103–21) examines
the portrayal of exotic New World cultures in the plays of Restoration
England and through to the eighteenth century. González-Treviño suggests
that ‘the former splendor and subsequent downfall of the Aztec empire served
as an appropriate theme for heroic drama . . . because it mirrored issues of
contemporary interest such as imperial domination, the torture and martyrdom of a supreme ruler, and the fantasy of a prelapsarian state of innocence
ruled by nature rather than art’ (p. 103). González-Treviño examines Dryden’s
Indian Emperor [1665] and other contemporary works, suggesting that the
success of these plays, which relied on elaborate and exotic costumes and
staging, ‘characterized the Restoration mise-en-scène’ (p. 106), driven by
commercial culture. Moreover, she states that the ‘headdress and crown shared
a common symbolic dimension . . . an attribute of the gods, or in mortals, the
sign of their connection with the divine through either birth or merit, [as] the
‘‘visible sign of success,’’ of light and spiritual enlightenment’ in a restored
monarchy situated in an expansionist economy (p. 108). González-Treviño
further stipulates that the ‘gradual realization of the performative nature of
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Books Reviewed
Andries, Lise. Intellectual Journeys: The Translation of Ideas in Enlightenment
England, France and Ireland. Voltaire. [2013] pp. ix þ 373. £75 ISBN 9 7807
2941 0786.
Atkins, G. Douglas. Alexander Pope’s Catholic Vision: ‘Slave To No Sect’.
PalMac Pivot. [2013] pp. 80. £49 ISBN 9 7811 3734 4779.
Bending, Stephen. Green Retreats: Women, Gardens and Eighteenth-Century
Culture. CUP. [2013] pp. x þ 312. £25 ISBN 9 7811 0704 0021.
Bigold, Melanie. Women of Letters, Manuscript Circulation and Print
Afterlives in the Eighteenth Century: Elizabeth Rowe, Catharine Cockburn,
and Elizabeth Carter. PalMac. [2013] pp. 312. £55 ISBN 9 7811 3703 3567.
Bowers, Jennifer, and Peggy Keeran. Literary Research: Strategies and
Sources, vol. 12: Literary Research and the British Eighteenth Century.
Scarecrow. [2013] pp. xiv þ 313. $65 ISBN 9 7808 1088 7954.
Broadie, Alexander. Agreeable Connexions: Scottish Enlightenment Links with
France. Edinburgh: Birlinn. [2013] pp. 391. £25 ISBN 9 7819 0656 6517.
Bullard, Paddy, and James McLaverty, eds. Jonathan Swift and the EighteenthCentury Book. CUP. [2013] pp. 304. £60 ISBN 9 7811 0701 6262.
Caines, Michael. Shakespeare and the Eighteenth Century. OUP. [2013] pp. xi
þ 222. £50 ISBN 9 7801 9964 2380.
Cook, Alexander, Ned Curthoys, and Shino Konishi, eds. Representing
Humanity in the Age of Enlightenment. P&C. [2013] pp. xv þ 237. £60 ISBN
9 7818 4893 3736.
Curtis-Wendlandt, Lisa, Karen Green, and Paul Gibbard, eds. Political Ideas
of Enlightenment Women: Virtue and Citizenship. Ashgate. [2013] pp. 264.
£70 ISBN 9 7814 7240 9539.
Damrosch, Leopold. Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World. YaleUP. [2013]
pp. ix þ 573. hb $35 ISBN 9 7803 0016 4992; pb $22 ISBN 9 7803 0020 5411.
Darcy, Jane. Melancholy and Literary Biography, 1640–1816. PalMac. [2013]
pp. xii þ 255. £55 ISBN 9 7811 3727 1082.
DeMello, Margo, ed. Speaking for Animals: Animal Autobiographical Writing.
Routledge. [2013] pp. 288. $140 ISBN 9 7804 1580 8996.
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otherness hints in turn at the performative nature of a government institution
whose currency had been severely impaired and even temporarily extinguished:
the figure of the monarch had been absent for more than a decade and some
research was required to re-establish his spectacular presence’ (p. 115).
González-Treviño concludes with the suggestion that ‘Player kings and
spectator monarchs coexisted because there was an inextricable semiotic
connection between the enactment of monarchy in the public arena and on the
stage’ (p. 117).
Finally, the excellent Celebrity, Performance, Reception: British Georgian
Theatre as Social Assemblage by David Worrall, because of its thematic
structure, is reviewed in the drama section of Chapter XIII.
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Duffy, Cian. The Landscapes of the Sublime, 1700–1830: Classic Ground.
PalMac. [2013] pp. vii þ 233. £55 ISBN 9 7811 3733 2172.
Dunan-Page, Anne, and Clothilde Prunier, eds. Debating the Faith: Religion
and Letter Writing in Great Britain, 1550–1800. Springer. [2013] pp. ix þ
215. £90 ISBN 9 7894 0075 2160.
Dunnigan, Sarah, and Suzanne Gilbert, eds. The Edinburgh Companion to
Scottish Traditional Literatures. EdinUP. [2013] pp. 224. £75 ISBN 9 7807
4864 5404.
Dussinger, John, and David Shuttleton, eds. Samuel Richardson.
Correspondence with George Cheyne and Thomas Edwards. CUP. [2013]
pp. lxxxiv þ 470. £74 ISBN 9 7805 2182 2855.
Eger, Elizabeth, ed. Bluestockings Displayed: Portraiture, Performance and
Patronage, 1730–1830. CUP. [2013] pp. xv þ 309. £60 ISBN 9 7805 2176 8801.
Feilla, Cecelia. The Sentimental Theatre of the French Revolution. Ashgate.
[2013] pp. xi þ 258. £68 ISBN 9 7814 0941 1635.
Florescu, Catalina, ed. Disjointed Perspectives on Motherhood. Lexington.
[2013] pp. 264. £5750 ISBN 9 7807 3918 3175.
Forster, Jean-Paul. Eighteenth-Century Geography and Representations of
Space in English Fiction and Poetry. Lang. [2013] pp. 233. £49 ISBN 9 7830
3431 2578.
Gerrard, Christine, ed. Samuel Richardson. Correspondence with Aaron Hill
and the Hill Family. CUP. [2013] pp. lii þ 384. £74 ISBN 9 7805 2187 2737.
Goss, Erin M. Revealing Bodies: Anatomy, Allegory, and the Grounds of
Knowledge in the Long Eighteenth Century. BuckUP. [2013] pp. xiii þ 223.
$85 ISBN 9 7816 1148 3949.
Gottlieb, Evan, and Juliet Shields, eds. Representing Place in British Literature
and Culture, 1660–1830: From Local to Global. Ashgate. [2013] pp. xi þ 221.
£60 ISBN 9 7814 0941 9303.
Gould, Philip. Writing the Rebellion: Loyalists and the Literature of Politics in
British America. OUP. [2013] pp. 240. $49.95 ISBN 9 7801 9996 7896.
Griffin, Michael. Enlightenment in Ruins: The Geographies of Oliver Goldsmith.
BuckUP. [2013] pp. 226. $85 ISBN 9 7816 1148 5059.
Jones, Emrys D. Friendship and Allegiance in Eighteenth-Century Literature:
The Politics of Private Virtue in the Age of Walpole. PalMac. [2013] pp. 232.
£55 ISBN 9 7811 3730 0492.
Juhas, Kirsten, Patrick Müller, and Mascha Hansen, eds. ‘The First Wit of the
Age’: Essays on Swift and his Contemporaries in Honour of Hermann J. Real.
Lang. [2013] pp. 409. £52 ISBN 9 7836 3163 8149.
Keen, Paul, ed. The Age of Authors: An Anthology of Eighteenth-Century Print
Culture. Broadview. [2013] pp. 477. £23.95 ISBN 9 7815 5481 0925.
Kennedy, Deborah. Poetic Sisters: Early Eighteenth-Century Women Poets.
BuckUP. [2013] pp. 328. $90 ISBN 9 7816 1148 4854.
Koehler, Margaret. Poetry of Attention in the Eighteenth Century. PalMac.
[2012] pp. 276. £61 ISBN 9 7811 3703 1129.
Latimer, Bonnie. Making Gender, Culture, and the Self in the Fiction of Samuel
Richardson. Ashgate. [2013] pp. 215. £54 ISBN 9 7814 0944 6323.
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MacKenzie, Scott R. Be It Ever So Humble: Poverty, Fiction, and the Invention
of the Middle-Class Home. UVirginiaP. [2013] pp. x þ 292. £42.95 ISBN
9 7808 1393 3412.
Manning, Susan. The Poetics of Character: Transatlantic Encounters 1700–
1900. CUP. [2013] pp. xiii þ 315. £65 ISBN 9 7811 0704 2407.
Marshall, Ashley. The Practice of Satire in England, 1658–1770. JHUP. [2013]
pp. xviii þ 430. $59.95 ISBN 9 7814 2140 8163.
Merrett, Robert James. Daniel Defoe: Contrarian. UTorP. [2013] pp. xxii þ
409. £48.05 ISBN 9 7814 4264 6100.
Morton, Richard. The English Enlightenment Reads Ovid: Dryden and Jacob
Tonson’s 1717 Metamorphoses. AMS. [2013] pp. 275. $82.50 ISBN 9 7804
0464 8626.
Murphy, Kevin D., and Sally O’Driscoll, eds. Studies in Ephemera: Text and
Image in Eighteenth-Century Print. BuckUP. [2013] pp. 318. $90 ISBN 9
7816 1148 4946.
Parisot, Eric. Graveyard Poetry: Religion, Aesthetics and the Mid-EighteenthCentury Poetic Condition. Ashgate. [2013] pp. 194. £60 ISBN 9 7814 0943 4733.
Pohl, Nicole, ed. Sarah Scott. The Letters. 2 vols. P&C. [2014] vol. 1, pp. lxiv þ
352; vol. 2, pp. 490. $350 ISBN 9 7818 4893 4689.
Prescott, Paul. Reviewing Shakespeare: Journalism and Performance from the
Eighteenth Century to the Present. Cambridge University Press. [2013] pp vii
þ 216 £55.00 ISBN 9 7811 0702 1495.
Regan, Shaun. Reading 1759: Literary Culture in Mid-Eighteenth-Century
Britain and France. BuckUP. [2012] pp. vii þ 255. £44.95 ISBN 9 7816 1148
4786.
Ritchie, Fiona, and Peter Sabor, eds. Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century.
CUP. [2012] pp. vii þ 454. £69.99 ISBN 9 7805 2189 8607.
Rounce, Adam. Fame and Failure 1720–1800: The Unfulfilled Literary Life.
CUP. [2013] pp. 258. £55 ISBN 9 7811 0704 2223.
Rumbold, Valerie, ed. Parodies, Hoaxes, Mock Treatises: Polite Conversation,
Directions to Servants and Other Works, vol. 2 of The Cambridge Edition of
the Works of Jonathan Swift. CUP. [2013] pp. xci þ 821. £85 ISBN 9 7805
2184 3263.
Saggini, Francesca. Backstage in the Novel: Frances Burney and the Theater
Arts. Trans. Laura Kopp. UVirginiaP. [2012] pp. xvi þ 315. £38 ISBN
9 7808 1393 2545.
Stewart, Carol, ed. The Rash Resolve and Life’s Progress through the
Passions, by Eliza Haywood. P&C. [2013] pp. 240. £45 ISBN 9 7818 4893
3361.
Swaminathan, Srividhya, and Adam R. Beach, eds. Invoking Slavery in the
Eighteenth-Century Imagination. Ashgate. [2013] pp. 228. £60 ISBN 9 7814
0946 9988.
Thain, Marion, ed. The Lyric Poem: Formations and Transformations. CUP.
[2013] pp. 260. $95 ISBN 9 7811 0701 0840.
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Thomason, Laura E. The Matrimonial Trap: Eighteenth-Century Women
Writers Redefine Marriage. BuckUP. [2013] pp. x þ 205. £49.65 ISBN 9 7816
1148 5264.
Thompson, A. Hamilton, ed. Essay on Man. CUP. [2013] pp. 134. £12.99
ISBN 9 7811 0761 9968.
Weinbrot, Howard David. Literature, Religion, and the Evolution of Culture,
1660–1780. JHUP. [2013] pp. xii þ 371. $60 ISBN 9 7814 2140 5162.
West, Alfred S., ed. Alexander Pope. Essay on Criticism. CUP. [2013] pp. 180.
£15.99 ISBN 9 7811 0762 0100.
Williams, Abigail, ed. Journal To Stella, vol. 9 of The Cambridge Edition of the
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2184 1665.
Wright, Gillian. Producing Women’s Poetry, 1600–1730: Text and Paratext,
Manuscript and Print. CUP. [2013] pp. 284. £59.99 ISBN 9 7811 0703
7922.
Zigarovich, Jolene, ed. Sex and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature.
Routledge. [2013] pp. xii þ 313. $140 ISBN 9 7804 1564 0039.
Zuroski Jenkins, Eugenia. A Taste for China: English Subjectivity and the
Prehistory of Orientalism. OUP. [2013] pp. xi þ 282. £47.99 ISBN 9 7801
9995 0980.