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Reviews/Les critiques Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936 to 1938, digital archive, Library of Congress https://bit.ly/2P9UTxw Review by Paul A. Minifee, San Diego State University

To the white myth of slavery must be added the slaves’ own folklore and folk-say of slavery.—B.A. Botkin, Chief Editor, Writers’ Unit, Library of Congress Project (1941) Since the 1970s, scholars have debated the authenticity and usefulness of materials housed in this digital archive, which includes over 2,300 narratives and 500 photographs of formerly enslaved people. Released in 2000 by the Library of Congress, it features the collabora tive efforts of the primarily white interviewers, writers, and editors of the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), a government-funded program tasked with documenting “America as a more pluralistic, inclusive society” in the 1930s (Shannon Carter and Deborah Mutnick, “Writing Democracy: Notes on a Federal Writers’ Project for the 21st Century,” Community Literacy Journal 7, no. 1 [2012]: 2). Because the database’s core contents have been scrutinized for decades, its “About this Collection” and “Articles and Essays” sections prove more valuable for students and scholars of history, sociology, cultural anthropology, and social psychology who can determine on their own how the slaves’ accounts could serve them. The title of this database might mislead some readers. While these slave narratives portray scenes of brutal punishments, rape, inhumane slave auctions, backwoods weddings, and ecstatic religious worship similar to those found in the autobiographies of Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs, the differences in their contextual and compositional constraints should be noted. Both sets of narratives involved editorial negotiations with socially and politically progressive white editors and publishers who sought to liberate African Americans from society’s prejudicial views and discriminatory laws; however, ide ological conflicts and methodological inconsistencies among the FWP administrative staff who produced these early twentieth-century accounts warrant serious considerations that explain ongoing deliberations re garding their historical significance. Organized on a state-by-state basis, each slave narrative includes the inter viewer’s name and a brief introduction with their impression of the subject. These prefaces expose the interviewers’ biases toward the “informants,” generally in favourable terms that remind us of the white abolitionists who endorsed nineteenth-century slave narrators. For example, writer Cecil Miller describes ex-slave John W. Fields as a “fine, colored man” and a “fine example of a man who has lived a morally and physically clean life.” However, the stylistic variations among entries reveal inconsistencies in the narratives’

Eighteenth-Century Fiction 33, no. 2 (Winter 2020–21) ECF ISSN 0840-6286 | E-ISSN 1911-0243 | doi: 10.3138/ecf.33.2.267 Copyright 2021 by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, McMaster University 268 Reviews production—including differences in questions posed, rhetorical framings, and editorial revisions or over-writing. In some cases, the interviewer acts as an amanuensis writing an objective transcription; in others, as an interlocutor who panders to the reader’s sympathies by sensationalizing the slave’s story through flowery, pathos-laden language. The anonymous writer of Sarah Graves’s story, for example, includes an epigraph by Shakespeare, “Sweet are the uses of Adversity / which like a toad, ugly and venomous, / wears yet a jewel in its head,” which clearly frames a compassionate depiction of Graves’s life. This writer, referring to themself as “the interviewer,” opens by describing Graves’s physical appearance (as many writers do of their subjects), including her hair, posture, smile, and clothing, and closes by glorifying the story of African Americans who survived slavery: “These children of a transplanted race, once enslaved, have through years of steadfast courage overcome the handicap of race and poverty.” The most objective entries resemble a transcription and only include a brief biographical abstract with the informant’s name, birth date and place, occupation, and current living situation. Notwithstanding the variations in each narrative’s rhetorical framing, style, and interlocutor influence, these slave narratives reveal at least two significant features about the genre that students of African American history and literature should consider. First, these narratives differ sub stantially from their nineteenth-century predecessors in plot: they depict the experiences of emancipated slaves as opposed to escaped fugitives. Arguably, one of the most compelling elements of antebellum slave nar ratives was the portrayal of how the enslaved escaped—whether they outwitted their masters, physically out-duelled their overseers, craftily used their unlawful literacy, or benefitted from abolitionist rescuers. The FWP narratives, on the other hand, are not plot-driven and, therefore, lack the literary conventions of foreshadowing and climax that engage readers anticipating a dramatic tale. Rather, they feature loosely woven anecdotes (generally based on the interviewers’ questions), dialogues, and descriptions of living conditions. Students and scholars will find en lightening the diversity of experiences, particularly depicting the intimate relationships between enslaved people, their masters, and their masters’ families. For example, Silas Abbott of Arkansas states that he and his master’s children (three girls and two boys) grew up playing together and that they “loved ’em like they was brothers.” Even more surprising, Abbott recalls how his mother disciplined their master’s children: “She whoop them when they needed.” In contrast, other stories illustrate gruesome scenes of beatings numbering five hundred lashes, with buckets of salt- and peppered-water poured on top of the wounds. The absence of novelistic plots in the twentieth-century narratives further underscores how dissimilarly emancipated slaves perceived their pasts when compared to escaped slaves’ accounts. As legally

ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University Critiques 269 free(d) citizens, the FWP narrators watched a generation of time elapse between the Emancipation Proclamation, the passing of the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Great Depression, which allowed this resilient group to view their past experiences from unique perspectives. A number of the narrators wax nostalgic when recalling their pasts, and, because they sat in their own homes (captured in hundreds of archived photographs), they also expressed their current circumstances in terms of gratitude. At the same time, the fact that the narrators drew from memories over sixty-five years in the past should not be regarded lightly, and it poses a second factor that distinguishes the two centuries’ slave narratives: reliability of memory. Most nineteenth-century slave narratives were published within twenty years of the subject’s escape, and many of them entailed a strategic production process—drafting, editing, consulting with abolitionists, reading of contemporaneous nar ratives, and negotiating with publishers—which, undoubtedly, hard- wired fairly recent memories. An FWP interviewer, however, arrived at an informant’s home with a pen and pad, asked a few questions, and transcribed the responses. This impromptu setting forced the nar rator to suddenly recall timeworn and long-forgotten memories and would not have allowed them enough time to compose a story. Rachel Adams, 78 at the time of her interview, addresses this point at the start: “Miss, dats been sich a long time back I has most forgot how things went.” Another informant, reflecting on how the abruptness of the interview affected his recollection of events, “expressed a desire to amend his previous interview to incorporate the following facts.” This second interview allotted Rev. W.B. Allen space for a more detailed and passionate testimony, which highlighted his spiritual conversion and calling to the ministry. Thus, scholars studying the effects of historical trauma on memory distortion, suppression, or supplementation would find these narratives useful. While the authenticity and usefulness of the narratives have long been contested, this archive of personal accounts, historical documents, and photographs nonetheless serve as empirical evidences of slavery’s multi farious realities. Ultimately, the images of receipts for payment of slaves, makeshift slave graves, freed slaves living in “corn cribs” (a storehouse used to dry and store corn), and “bell racks” (contraptions used by slavers to prevent enslaved people from running away, consisting of a metal collar that fit around the neck and strapped onto the belt loop of the pants) stand out, as they depict the undeniably raw truth of the barbaric treatment endured by these surviving storytellers. Paul A. Minifee is an Associate Professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing Studies at San Diego State University and Vice President of Curriculum Design at ion Learning.

Jane Austen in Context Broadview Press, 2019. ISBN 978-1554814398. https://broadviewpress.com/product/broadview-online-jane-austen-in-context Review by Nicole Mansfield Wright, University of Colorado at Boulder

With thanks to Mariah Chao, Min Ling Chua, Ector Diego, Alison Durfee, Eva Kareus, Bruce Kaufman, Noah Mahoney, and Darya Navid With remote learning on the rise, the coronavirus pandemic may accelerate a longstanding trend of reallocating library funds to digital subscriptions. Such developments bode well for the success of Broadview Press’s recently launched, author-focused “companion websites,” includ ing Jane Austen in Context. The Austen site caters to “students ... who would like help with term paper research.” Given the target audience, this review includes feedback from undergraduates enrolled in an honours seminar on British literary history. A number of students were enthusi astic about the site’s prospects. Indeed, the site has the makings of a valuable course supplement. Yet its current iteration seems to be more of a prototype; substantial development is necessary to unlock its potential. The site’s home page links to four primary areas: a selection of scholarship on Austen’s fiction (primarily her six completed novels); interactive maps of settings featured in the novels; click-to-expand time lines of relevant biographical and historical developments; and a search able collection of contextual materials, including images, pertaining to Regency culture and politics, with topics ranging from “Domestic Life” to “Wills and Primogeniture.” Undergirding the presentation is an anti-New Critical premise: the site implicitly contends that readers must familiarize themselves with Austen’s world in order to understand her work. In written comments, students lauded the site’s convenience and cura tion. Several recalled struggling on their own to distinguish worthy research from dubious sources when confronting the massive array of search results in online databases such as Google Scholar and JSTOR. They perceived Broadview’s effort as a potential solution to that problem, for it includes a manageable selection of critical essays (five or six per novel) vetted for quality. At a time when reference librarians may be less accessible because they are working remotely, online resources need to fill the void. Unlike some Austen websites for advanced aficionados, the site is streamlined. A student remarked: “I was pleasantly surprised [by] how neatly the website was laid out ... I already know a lot more about Jane Austen despite the fact that I am not familiar with this author.” The interactive maps and timelines were the favourite elements. A self- described “Austen fanatic” commented: “The maps were fun to play around with ... it was very entertaining to have a visual representation of where Austen’s characters move to throughout the course of her stories.”

Yet there is considerable room for improvement. No list of the site’s editors or compilers was included. A student pointed out: “There should be a page that states where ... the information on the site is coming from. This would make the site more credible.” Another student noted that while the essays are grouped according to the novels on which they focus, there is no further structure to their categorization. Each essay is prefaced with a blurb summarizing its argument, but there is no explanation of why it was chosen or the essay’s place in Austen scholarship. Users must click into each PDF and scroll to the end to see publication dates. The site does not render visible the extent to which views of Austen have developed over time. Even brief excerpts from Deidre Shauna Lynch’s edited collection Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Devotees (2000) and Devoney Looser’s The Making of Jane Austen (2017) would help fill this gap. While the content illuminates the time and place in which Austen wrote, the site obscures the author and, at points, her readers. There are no images or biography of Austen, nor is there a bibliography of her work; students requested a biography page to complement the timeline. Although such information could be accessed via search engines, these are surprising omissions. “I would like more primary sources that reflect the reception of Austen’s literature at the time that it was published,” one student commented. That student added: “The critical readings provide commentary on what critics and scholars think retrospectively, but I would like information on how her work was received, what critics of the day thought about it, and if/how people perceived her work in terms of its social and political relevance.” Another suggested: “Give us information on the people who read Austen’s novels. I’m not talking about critics and scholars. I’m talking about the everyday people who read her novels.” Some students perceived what one called a “pro-Austen” editorial slant that primed students to admire her work rather than objectively assess it. One observed: “Austen was not loved by all ... including commentary her rivals may have said about her would create a well-rounded site.” Others thought the site took for granted that student visitors already grasp the scope of Austen’s literary innovations and the basis of her canonical status: “The site does an excellent job providing context ... I understand, based on the information provided, the political, social, and literary scenes of the time. I don’t, however, feel like I totally got Austen’s place in it.” This student sought more material devoted to “understanding her influence and legacy.” Another student concurred: “It is obvious that Austen is significant, but it [the site] does not explicitly state why she was significant.” In general, the site is geared toward encouraging students to absorb content rather than generate their own responses to Austen’s oeuvre. One student would like “a way to tag items and compile a list” while brainstorming essay ideas. Students recommended that the site add sections on Austen’s writings beyond her novels, including her letters. One found it puzzling that the

ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University 272 Reviews maps detailed only two specific plot events, both from Pride and Prejudice. Visual aids for works beyond the major novels are less prevalent, and thus would add particular value to Broadview’s site. More advanced multimedia and digital humanities tools would enhance the site’s appeal to a new generation of students. The site could broaden its audience by addressing faculty as well as students. A password-protected instructor section could feature lesson plans and teaching-oriented articles such as Patricia A. Matthew’s “Jane Austen and the Abolitionist Turn” (Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 2019). The site could prepare instructors to teach about race and other complex topics. A student observed of the site: “There is not a lot about Jane Austen and her works in relation to prejudice and racism, at least when in comparison to other essays about her work.” Moreover, two of the four featured essays related to race or empire were initially published in the mid-1990s. The site thus would benefit from adding more twenty-first-century criticism, such as Sara Salih’s “The Silence of Miss Lambe: Sanditon and Contextual Fictions of ‘Race’ in the Abolition Era” (ECF, 2006), and Pamela Buck’s “Consuming China: Imperial Trade and Global Exchange in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park” (LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, 2019). Teaching of nuanced formal innovations could also be supplemented with site materials. Because Austen’s free indirect style can be difficult to grasp for undergraduates, the site could add readings to clarify its mechanics, such as excerpts from D.A. Miller’s Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style (2003) and Jenny Davidson’s Reading Jane Austen (2017). In an era of inclusive pedagogy, the site should provide tools for students of all abilities. “Integrating a free translation software would make the archive more accessible to international or ASL scholars,” one student advised. They also suggested: “An image description function for the interactive maps would be helpful for visually impaired scholars. Some computers come with screen-reading software, but images, especially heavily detailed ones such as the maps, cannot be translated without image IDs. In addition, some of the maps are too small.” Likewise, the images of paintings in the context section are close to thumbnail size and cannot be expanded. I have long relied on Broadview for editions with clear notes and appen dices that render literary classics approachable for students. I believe that this publisher will improve on the site’s promising foundations. The current version is likely the first iteration of what could be a go-to resource. Nicole Mansfield Wright is the author of Defending Privilege: Rights, Status, and Legal Peril in the British Novel (2020). Her work has appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Eighteenth- Century Fiction, Eighteenth-Century Studies, and Toronto Quarterly.

Women, Performance and the Material of Memory: The Archival Tourist, 1780–1915by Laura Engel Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. xvi+169pp. £43.99. e-ISBN 978-1-137-58932-3. Review by Alexandra L. Milsom, Hostos Community College The field of tourism theory has always relied on the imagery of the theatre as a vehicle. Dean MacCannell’s germinal 1973 paper on tourism foregrounds this metaphor in its title: “Staged Authenticity: Arrangements of Social Space in Tourist Settings” (American Journal of Sociology 79, no. 3 [1973]: 589–603). MacCannell based his theory of tourism on Erving Goffman’s influential work on our “back”- and “front”-facing personae in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) to help him explain what is happening when tourists travel. In short: tourists often get presented with “front”-stage performances of local authenticity, such as a gondolier singing opera while paddling Venetian canals, but they are seeking “back”-stage access to authenticate their experiences. If you note the ubiquity of words such as “hidden” or “local” in touristic literature, you will see the premium placed on supposedly “back”-stage sites. Literary scholars have made use of tourism theory from time to time, but Laura Engel’s Women, Performance and the Material of Memory: The Archival Tourist, 1780–1915 renews this theoretical framework for archival work, using its terms to propose a method of regarding one’s own research practices. This theoretical reframing helpfully examines the dynamics of voyeurism, what to make of physical contact with objects in the archive, and notions of authenticity that arise in processes of working with material objects from the past. This articulation of tourism theory as a means for regarding archival work is not the only theoretical breakthrough of Engel’s highly readable monograph. Overtop this first framework—one rooted in the social science of Goffman and MacCannell—Engel draws upon studies in per formance and celebrity, more familiar than tourism theory to literary scholars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to look at the material objects under review in each chapter. Engel is explicit about the stakes of this cross-pollination, explaining that “tourism is celebrating the archives and the archives are filled with tourists. While there are many ways to distinguish between the two, linking them may allow us to imagine ourselves as dynamic embodied participants in the translation between the past and the present” (19). In retraining the eye backwards on the archival scholar as well as forward on the performance of identities in eighteenth-century art, literature, and theatre, Engel plays a deft trick—one that pays off. To those already familiar with Engel’s two important books on eighteenth-century performance and gender, her explicit and recurring application of tourism theory throughout this latest volume only adds

ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University 274 Reviews to one’s appreciation of her deft analysis of materiality and performance. The objects of Engel’s inquiry, which she explains are “specifically tied to memory and the staging or representation/recreation of corporeal presence” (2), follow a chronological sequence. This sequence of chapters begins with an exploration of Elizabeth Inchbald’s pocket diaries. It continues with Thomas Lawrence’s portraits of and correspondence with Sarah Siddons and her daughters Sally and Maria, and then offers a chapter examining the Countess of Blessington’s estate sale through the lens of her Magic Lantern; or, Sketches of Scenes in the Metropolis (1822) (itself an important theoretical examination of tourism). The pen ultimate chapter assesses the significance of Isabella Beetham and her daughter Jane Read’s silhouettes and Madame Tussaud’s wax sculptures. The book concludes with Fanny Kemble’s plantation journal and Amelia M. Watson’s subsequent photographs of Kemble’s land. Working with the material objects that form the centre of this work, Engel is self- conscious of her role as the sorter and chronicler of materiality. She writes almost as a tour guide, leading readers deftly across the centuries and through diverse media. Most of the figures under scrutiny in this book were performers, artists, and celebrities, and Engel’s theoretical approach calls due attention to the feeling of self-consciousness that arises in the handling of their artifacts—the body of the scholar interacting with the artifacts of bodies from the past who were, in turn, consciously producing traces of their own materiality and physicality. Engel teaches us all to be more self-conscious of the materiality of the archival objects under our scrutiny as well as the effects and consequences of that same materiality. Engel’s introduction is a useful site for those interested in a precise articulation of tourism theory and its applicability to historical literary studies, but it does not fully prepare the reader for how cohesive and often moving the rest of the book will be. The most satisfying aspect of reading the book in its entirety lies in bearing witness to depictions of familial female relationships that Engel discovers while touring these particular material objects. When we get to chapter 4, for instance, we are surprisingly not finished with Inchbald (chapter 2) nor with Lawrence (chapter 3) because we learn of a previously unknown portrait of the former by the latter found in the Countess of Blessington’s estate auction catalog. And in chapter 6, we learn that Fanny Kemble is the grand-niece of Sarah Siddons (chapter 3). What might perhaps be considered the most moving story in the whole book also documents Engel’s formidable archival prowess: the sorrowful love triangle formed between Lawrence and the two Siddons daughters in the third chapter. First, by carefully reading Maria’s analysis of her sister Sally’s singing and songwriting, Engel diligently restores Maria’s reputation from the calumny of their famous mother’s biographers who characterized Maria as “flighty and superficial” (66).

Maria—in love with Lawrence—writes movingly about her sister’s new song “When summer’s burning heats arise” (65), not knowing that the song was written while Sally was secretly reconciling with Lawrence herself; not knowing that in three months, she (Maria) would die. Engel also restores to the record a letter Sally penned a few years later of her own distant, painful final encounter with Lawrence at the theatre: she sees him through a spy-glass and realizes that he no longer loves her, for “she has ‘passed’ from his heart and will now be ‘mixed’ with the many who have gone before and were forgotten” (75). In this love triangle, we see how the touristic theory lends itself so well to the scholar’s self-scrutiny. In witnessing Engel looking at the archive, resurrecting documents and letters heretofore deliberately erased by modest biographers of yore, we also recognize the sadness of these intimate, private moments, which were not meant for public or historical consumption. These are artifacts of the unstaged moments of very hyper-staged people— performers, artists, and celebrities. In caring about these artifacts as well as her role as an archival tourist, Engel gives us a useful model by which scholars can become better guides of history for all of their readers.

Alexandra L. Milsom, an Assistant Professor of English at Hostos Community College (City University of New York), is currently completing a monograph on the relationship between Catholic Emancipation and the evolution of the nineteenth-century British guidebook.

Paper Minds: Literature and Ecology of Consciousness by Jonathan Kramnick University of Chicago Press, 2018. 298pp. $25. ISBN 978-0-226-57315-1. Review by Wendy Anne Lee, New York University By the time you are reading these words, Paper Minds will already have been reviewed in several publications and you may know the basics: this is a collection of essays that (1) doubles down on literary studies and its method of close reading (see part 1: “On Method and the Disciplines,” which includes an essay co-authored by Anahid Nersessian), (2) applies philosophies of enactive perception to an “ecological” reading of Georgic poetry (see part 2: “Poetry and the Perception of the Environment”), and (3) features what David Chalmers has called the “hard problem” of consciousness, that is to say, the mystery of why phenomenal or subjective experience—the question of What it is like?—even happens. For the readers of this journal, then, I will focus on the import of the book’s third and final part, “Fictions of Mind,” to consider its potential relevance to our field. For starters, apart from localized passages of Robinson Crusoe and a handful of pages on Sentimental Journey, little eighteenth-century fiction

ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University 276 Reviews appears in Paper Minds. And while the meta-conversations about formal ism, disciplinarity, and aesthetics will attract other reviewers, my remit is to find the pay-off for the study of early fiction. It arrives at the very end of Kramnick’s book, surprisingly in a reading of Marilynne Robinson’s remarkable and much acclaimed 1980 novel, Housekeeping. Preceded by an analysis of a panpsychism advanced by Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666), Kramnick’s reading of Housekeeping intensifies and refines earlier, looser claims linking consciousness, materialism, and writing. Like other theorists of narrative—in particular, those (including Ann Banfield, D.A. Miller, Blakey Vermeule, and Frances Ferguson) who elaborate the special powers of free indirect style—Kramnick roots much of his textual analysis in point of view, fiction’s means of “putting you in the position to be the subject of [another] creature’s perception” (144) and thereby to experience, paraphrasing Robinson, “the feeling of reality on another nervous system” (151). Notably, then, his analysis moves past grammatical position (“Ruth’s first person at once expands in a watery thinness and mutes as it is no longer just hers”) to take in the virtuosic ways that focalized narrative can slip into a cosmic impersonality, shift ing from “a view from one perspective” to “a view from no perspective” such that “phenomenal experience seems at once to lace over every object and belong almost to no one” (155). I can see how Kramnick’s account of Robinson’s ability to “tamp down singular features of personality while at the same time ... open up a vantage onto the strange, aqueous world in which the novel is set” might spur other insights about, say, Bunyan, Inchbald, Rousseau, and Wollstonecraft (152). Embedded in Kramnick’s valedictory nod to fictional language is the claim that Housekeeping features “a simultaneous attention to experience and disregard for the singularity of any character in whom such experience might reside” (152). The articulation here of a narrative project to attend closely to consciousness and, at the same time, to deindividualize its phenomenology conveys a charge of ethical excitement that surpasses milder claims for the discernment of a quantum universe or an “injunction to attend to the forms experience takes” or the particularities of haptic experience (145). Indeed, the book’s most vivid passage of literary interpretation expresses an ontological commitment that diverges (for this reader, happily) from its earlier account of literature’s “ready-to-hand” “affordances.” In an account of Housekeeping’s “conspiracy of the senses with the world,” Kramnick attaches in the end to “a dissolving or dissolution, as if the indifference between one’s own sentience and the sentience of everything else meant a kind of final and permanent unknitting of the person” (155). All this is to point out that it is through his engagement with Robinson’s fiction and ideas about fiction that Kramnick arrives at his most sharpened formulations. For all of the disciplinary modesty and genteel pluralism of the preceding chapters, the lede gets buried at the end:

“The work of literary form is just to worry, tweak, and pose the relation between the physical and the phenomenal” so that it is even possible to posit “the idea that perception is the very wonder of the physical, not its transcendence” (151). Narrative prose fiction or all literature, in other words, exists to recast the enigmatic relation between the material world and the experience of consciousness of being in that world—an uneven terrain of objects that changes as I move, that I perceive imperfectly through my species-specific organs of sense, that I navigate sometimes with success and often with failure. Glossing Robinson’s essay on fiction, “Freedom of Thought” (published in her 2012 collection When I Was a Child I Read Books), Kramnick writes, “Science should remember that the physical (whether conceived at the scale of particles or of neurons) includes sentience, and fiction should recognize the felt property of mind in physical matter” (151). In the designation of these tasks for science and for fiction—one to remember and the other to recognize—we hear an appeal that belies the accommodating spirit of “ontological pluralism,” which characterizes the earlier essays. Robinson in “Freedom of Thought” lays out “two questions I can’t really answer about fiction”: “(1) where it comes from, and (2) why we need it” (7). Insofar as Paper Minds tells a story about the novel’s co-emergence with paradigms of mind and matter, it picks up and tries to answer those questions.

Wendy Anne Lee teaches in the English Department at New York University. She is the author of Failures of Feeling: Insensibility and the Novel (2019) and writes largely about Enlightenment literature and philosophy.

Migration and Modernities: The State of Being Stateless, 1750–1850, ed. JoEllen DeLucia and Juliet Shields Edinburgh University Press, 2019. 224pp. £75. ISBN 978-1474440349. Review by Omar F. Miranda, University of San Francisco Accounts of literal and metaphorical, forced or voluntary, displacement have been at the heart of the human story since ancient times. Consider The Epic of Gilgamesh, Ramayana, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, Sappho’s lyrics, and Sophocles’s plays as some indicators of the predominance of exilic narratives across the globe and ages. As John Simpson argues in the introduction to The Oxford Book of Exile, “Each of us is an exile ... We are exiles from our mother’s womb, from our childhood, from private happiness, from peace ... The feeling of looking back for the last time, of setting our face to a new and possibly hostile world is one we all know” ([Oxford University Press, 1995], vii). But something about this universal truth changed dur ing the eighteenth century and the age of revolution, in particular. The introduction of the free market system, the industrialization of urban

ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University 278 Reviews spaces, the emergence of the modern nation-state, and the growth and decline of empires are among the many phenomena that contributed to an unprecedented rise in migratory patterns across the world and a subsequent transformation of our modern consciousness. Even though the global movements of the period caused major upheavals and population shifts, scholarship on this subject has been largely neglected. High praise is thus merited for the present volume, which has responded to this scholarly need through an interdisciplinary approach that brings together the fine work of both European and American scholars. Recovering and revising (literary) histories of mobility, these essays explore the “patterns, conditions, and experience of migration at a moment that we might char acterize as the beginnings of modernity” (1). Migration and Modernities argues as a whole that the mass migrations and dislocations of the eighteenth century indelibly transformed our modern subjectivity; it addresses the sense of rootlessness and estrangement that came to classify these decades. Tracking the effects of war, imperialism, technological advancements, and uneven development across cultures and emphasizing the experience of the “arrival and departure of migrants,” including that experienced by “itinerant laborers, vagrants, sailors, and soldiers” (5, 6), the volume focuses on the ruptures and removals from the comforts of place and the logic of the local, that is, one’s culture, community, and nation. The essays also explore the ironic relationship between the consolidation of political, ethnic borders and the politics and aesthetics of occlusion and exile. And for these scholars, such analysis is crucial to both individual and collective identity formations, including the construction and consolidation of the modern nation-state. What makes Migration and Modernities impressive is that it fittingly introduces its subject matter on mobility, belonging, rights, and citizen ship through a comparative and global framework. In the service of piecing together a “global literary history of migration” (7), it offers refreshing accounts on subjects within and well beyond Europe, from South America and Southeast Asia to South Africa. Readers are brought to chapters on Serbian and Peruvian migrations, as well as on the displacements of Native Americans, Turks, and enslaved African people. Of course, any such “global” scholarly aspiration limited to 224 pages must necessarily exclude migratory accounts from certain regions and ethnicities. Still, this collection is praiseworthy, especially when considering that in this period few records have been available for accurately charting the sta tistics of these migrations. As JoEllen DeLucia and Juliet Shields claim in their editors’ introduction, the eighteenth century lacked the mass print technologies of the nineteenth century that better equipped the dissemination of such knowledge and figures. The eight essays are divided into two parts, with each half of the book resisting customary organizational methods according to nation, culture, or language; this atypical structure seems apt, given the vagaries of migrant

ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University Critiques 279 experience itself. The first part, “Moving Voices: Competing Perspectives on Migration,” shows the “alternatives to the domestic and realist fiction that shapes most studies of particular national traditions” (3). Highlighting the “migrants’ varying forms of mobility,” the essays examine authors such as Lord Byron, Thomas Pringle, Mary Prince, and Margaret Fuller, while drawing attention to the forced mass displacements of Africans in the Atlantic slave trade and the involuntary resettlements of Native Americans. Kenneth McNeil’s chapter on Prince and her editor, Pringle, is specifically noteworthy, as McNeil traces how a white abolitionist, who was displaced from Scotland to South Africa, came to sympathize, edit, and ultimately promote Prince’s autobiography. The essay is emblematic of how the entire section treats hybrid narratives of exiles, expatriates, and refugees across racial, ethnic, gender, and class lines. The second part, “Migrants as Cultural Mediators: Epistemes and Aesthetics of Mobility,” extends the ambitious first half of the book by analyzing a particular form of knowledge production—what DeLucia and Shields call autoethnography, “the study of one’s own culture as if from an outsider’s perspective” (8). The section begins with Patricia Cove’s keen exploration of gender and national identity in Frances Burney’s The Wanderer (1814); this is followed by Dragana Grbić’s in vestigation of the relations between Serbian cultural identity and the experience of migration in the autobiography The Life and Adventures of Dimitrije Obradović (1783). Olivera Jokić’s essay then offers a com pelling reading of letters from agents of the East India company, draw ing attention unexpectedly to the vulnerability rather than the progress of the British imperial state. Echoing Dominic La Capra’s ideas about historiography, Jokić notes the distinctiveness of this “history of work done by migrants—a history in transit” (170). The section ends with Claire Gallien’s “first extensive exploration” of Ishmael Bashaw’sThe Turkish Refugee (1797), an adapted Christian conversion and slave nar rative (202). These essays convincingly demonstrate the porousness of “culture” and collective identity, as they tease out the tensions be tween being at home and abroad. They demonstrate how otherness is constructed and experienced from either a native or foreign position. If one had to be critical of a volume that elicits much admiration from the present author, I would offer two minor suggestions for improvement. Betsy Bolton’s reading of “touring and forced migration” in Byron’s Don Juan as well as M. Soledad Caballero’s account of “Transatlantic” South American revolutionaries would have benefitted from direct engagement with the life of the Venezuelan exile Francisco de Miranda (1750– 1816). In exile for thirty-three years and a resident in London for four teen of them, Miranda served as an impor tant precursor not only to Simón Bolívar and his continent-wide independence movements in the Americas, but also to Byron’s celebrity of exile, as I have argued elsewhere

(Miranda, “The Celebrity of Exilic Romance: Francisco de Miranda and Lord Byron,” European Romantic Review 27, no. 2 [2016]: 207–31). Don Juan is, in fact, a testament to Byron’s South American celebrity predecessor. The second recommendation is perhaps more obvious: Why include a chapter on Byron (even if Bolton’s essay is unquestion ably excellent) when the extra space could be devoted to the unexplored and unrepresented peoples and cultures of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific? And I say this—uneasily—as a Byron scholar. These minor criticisms aside, this volume persuasively traces one of the most critical moments and subjects of modern history. Migration and Modernities radically reimagines the boundaries of our discipline and canon by boldly repositioning global narratives of mobility at the heart of modernity. If this cross-cultural work is a sign of what is to come in our field, the future of writing about the history of movements and displacements in eighteenth-century studies looks most promising.

Omar F. Miranda is an Assistant Professor at the University of San Francisco. His research focuses on exile, celebrity culture, and performance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

A History of British Working Class Literature, ed. John Goodridge and Bridget Keegan Cambridge University Press, 2017. 496pp. $114.95. ISBN 978-1107190405. Review by Thora Brylowe, University of Colorado Boulder As John Goodridge and Bridget Keegan remind us in the introduction, “working class literature is rarely received in other than partial or con tingent ways,” subject to flattened (and flattening) assumptions about what it means to be working class and what it means to claim for a work the status of literature (3). This ambitious collection spans the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, and even makes a brief foray into the twenty- first century, albeit in an essay by Cole Crawford, who writes in his capacity as eighteenth-century expert on digital collections, many of which will interest ECF readers. This is a substantial book. Of its twenty- five essays, twelve are devoted to the eighteenth century and Romantic period, a number that swells to fourteen if we count Crawford’s and a brief afterword by Brian Maidment. Given space and the readership of ECF, this review attends to (roughly) the first half of the collection. The book starts strong, with Jennie Batchelor’s closely argued call to expand the limits of working-class literature to include genres that are often dismissed as valuable merely in the register of sociological representation. She warns that in demanding of working people “good” writing, we throw in our lot with the elite category of the aesthetic and risk

ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University Critiques 281 missing the often sophisticated manipulation of literary genre wielded by labouring people. As evidence, Batchelor close reads an archive of written testimonials that were read aloud to Trustees of the Foundling Hospital. Her rich reading finds evidence of poor women’s dependence on and revision of pre-existing sentimental seduction and street ballad plots. Poor women adapted these plots to suit a complex and contradictory matrix of desperation, need for charity, and the obligation to appear as a victim rather than as the perpetrator of a violation of social expectations. Batchelor’s essay reads especially well with and against Scott McEthron’s fascinating analysis of another London institution, the Literary Fund Society, established in 1788 as a kind of stop-gap charity measure for authors whose works were determined to promote the national good. Later renamed the Royal Literary Fund, the institution neither granted annuities nor funded particular projects. Rather, its aim was to support with single lump-sum payments those authors of merit (or their survivors) who had fallen on hard times. While Batchelor’s essay is concerned with petitioners, McEthron reads his archive from the perspective of benefactors, who, given their society’s mission, had to contend with thorny questions regarding what constitutes literature worthy of charity. Another highlight is Franca Dellarosa’s treatment of Edward Rushton’s (1756–1814) posthumously published, untitled essay on race. Rushton writes against both the popular climatological model of racial superior ity and a pseudoscientific “polygenetic” justification for enslavement, an argument that held that Africans were of a different species than white Europeans. Dellarosa shows how Rushton’s careful rhetoric makes a surprisingly modern case for the constructed nature of race, which follows from his awareness of class position. Neither climate nor genetics—nature—are responsible for what ultimately amounts to the “edifice” (Rushton’s word) of race and class (121). Dellarosa takes her title, “Behold the Coromantees,” from Rushton’s 1824 poem about the plight of enslaved “Coromantees,” people of the Gold Coast, who were forced to fight in a skirmish when French privateers boarded the vessel on which they were enslaved and transported. In Rushton’s poem, the Coromantees become “the synecdoche for those ‘millions’ who are the casualties of any imperial power” (126). Other essays fall more within the traditionally literary. Readers interested in the work of the lauded poet/grain-thresher Stephen Duck (1705–56) will find capable entries by Jennifer Batt and by William Christmas. Steve Van Hagen’s discussion of Ann Yearsley (1753–1806) and “the shoe-maker poet” James Woodhouse (1735–1820) takes up the way these poets wrote verses that resist and repurpose the concept of “natural genius” after breaks with their respective patrons. Van Hagen urges his readers to rethink patronage and “the conventions of their [that is, labouring poets’] promotion to the reading public and about how they responded to those conventions”

(57). A pattern emerged by which the unschooled, “natural genius” poet is deemed worthy by a patron who recognizes and promotes that author’s work. In their rerouting the idea of natural genius through the concept of radical evangelical equality, Van Hagen finds for Yearsley and Woodhouse in particular—and for labouring poets more generally—the potential to resist class stratification and exploitation. By contrast, Kerry Andrews’s brief but compelling formalist take on Yearsley examines her appropriations of the elegy, a profoundly masculinist form. Expressly avoiding biography, Andrews instead offers a psychological reading of Yearsley’s elegies that finds generic consistencies opposed to the traditional masculine elegy’s “usual process of separation, apotheosis, and distancing” (99). Three essays in particular round out the British context in our period. On the Scottish front, Gerrard Caruthers makes sense of the twists and turns of Paisley poet Alexander Wilson’s (1766–1813) eclectic career. Wilson, a weaver-turned-poet, wrote radical, anonymous broadsides and conventionally moralizing tales of everyday life, such as “Watty and Meg, or The Wife Reformed” (1792), a Robert Burns–style revision of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, much praised by Wilson’s Victorian editors. Wilson’s biography proves fascinating and diverse. Caruthers’s dense thirteen pages address Wilson’s relationship to his audience and contemporary poets against the backdrop of Scottish politics and religion. Mary-Ann Constantine’s discussion of eighteenth-century Welsh poetic traditions puts pressure on the Anglocentric conceptualization of working-class poetry by demonstrating the challenges posed to it by the Welsh bardic tradition. Poetic fame seems to have worked quite differently in Wales, since access to the poetic tradition did not require formal education and since print circulation was not the only path to authorial success. Constantine ends her lively essay with two case studies, Edward Williams (1747–1826), a Welsh poet who tried his fortune in London, and, much more briefly, Richard Llwyd (1752– 1835). She does so in order to highlight the difference between the two, who both published English-language poetry at around the same time. Jennifer Orr opens a rich literary history of Ulster’s linguistic identity vis-à-vis a transnational Romantic tradition of working-class poetry via a reading of Seamus Heaney’s 1998 “A Birl for Burns.” She observes, “Heaney’s poetic recognition of Burns’s cultural influence on his corner of Ireland might ... be seen as an important stage in a long process of forgetting, rediscovery, and the eventual disinterment of Ulster’s transnational culture” (133). Like Constantine, Orr cautions against a tendency to lump working-class writers into broad (in this case Unionist) national categories. Orr shows that the Romantic Ulster Scot poets had a fully formed cultural and linguistic minority identity that went almost completely unrecognized for two centuries.

Finally, in a category all its own, is Ian Haywood’s profoundly resonant analysis of James Gillray’s (1756–1815) eight-plate visual satire The Life of William Cobbett, published in 1809. Haywood’s is the only essay to tackle a visual object, and readers are provided with reproductions of all eight prints, although the quality leaves much to be desired. As Haywood explains, Cobbett (1763–1835) and other radicals of the early nineteenth century leveraged a spotless character and unwavering commitment to politics as a rhetorical tactic in order to distance themselves from the Jacobin rabble-rousing of the 1790s. This distancing meant that their autobiographical or “life writing” was always written defensively. A resort to their own character left radicals, especially country radicals like Cobbett, subject to intense bio graphical scrutiny. Unfortunately for Cobbett, his detractors dug up a whistleblowing incident, nearly 20 years past, in which he accused his Army superiors of financial misconduct. A pro-government pamphlet claimed Cobbett had falsely accused the officers in 1792 in order to escape his duty and then had fled the country to avoid the exposure that a false accusation would bring. Cobbett could only respond to this assault on his character with further biographical details, leaving his past open to further scrutiny and his character open to accusations of egoism. Haywood shows how Gillray’s print series contributes to the pro-administration misinformation campaign, producing a fake biography of Cobbett in the style of a Hogarthian tale of moral decline. In plate 1, Cobbett appears as a thuggish child, a vicious bumpkin whose doting parents can be seen smiling proudly upon his misdeeds. In an astonishing anticipation of recent events in American politics, Haywood writes, “Plates 3–6 represent the main theme of the series in which Cobbett becomes (in modern parlance) a whistle-blower. Gillray replaces Cobbett’s righteous account of exposing regimental corruption with an anti-Jacobin narrative of botched seditious conspiracy; stereo typically, radicalism is presented as simultaneously threatening and ludicrous” (182). In the midst of other woes than Cobbett’s, we might take some solace from the fact that Haywood convincingly argues that Gillray’s satire is haunted by the contrapuntal spectre of revolutionary force. We might take solace in this collection as a whole, which makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the origins of the diverse and unruly category that is working-class literature. Thora Brylowe is an Associate Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and author of Romantic Art in Practice: Cultural Work and the Sister Arts, 1760– 1820 (2018), which examines a group of printers, authors, editors, painters, and engravers, who worked with and against each other in and around London.

Philosophie des pornographes par Colas Duflo Seuil, 2019. 312pp. €23. ISBN 978-2-02-140417-3. Critique littéraire par Christophe Martin, Sorbonne Université

Le nouveau livre de Colas Duflo s’inscrit dans le prolongement direct des Aventures de Sophie. La philosophie dans le roman au XVIIIe siècle, paru en 2013, qui proposait de s’intéresser à un vaste corpus au siècle des Lumières: celui des « romans à ambition philosophique », en examinant les différentes formes et modalités de la présence de la philosophie dans le roman de la période, ainsi que ses conséquences narratives et philosophiques (voir notre critique de ce volume dans ECF 28, n° 3 [2016]). Duflo y indiquait déjà nettement que la philosophie ne pouvant se ramener à un thème littéraire, le roman à ambition philosophique pouvait se décliner en roman noir philosophique, en roman d’aventures philosophiques ou encore en « roman pornographique philosophique » (41). Mais si la place de ces romans philosophico-pornographiques était déjà toute tracée, le paradoxe est que Les Aventures de Sophie ne leur consacrait quasiment aucune analyse. Justice leur est donc rendue dans ce nouveau livre qui démontre amplement que ce corpus méritait bien plus qu’une étude annexe ou un simple chapitre supplémentaire. Non seulement, les romans philosophico-pornographiques tels que Dom B***, Portier des Chartreux, Thérèse philosophe, Les Bijoux indiscrets, Mémoires de Suzon, ou Le Rideau levé appartiennent de droit au corpus plus vaste analysé dans Les Aventures de Sophie, mais ils posent des problèmes spécifiques et sans doute encore plus cruciaux pour notre compré hension de la philosophie des Lumières. Si le précédent livre de Duflo invitait à se défaire d’une conception largement héritée du XIXe et du XXe siècle, selon laquelle la philosophie et le roman relèveraient de domaines séparés, il s’agit ici de renoncer à un préjugé sans doute encore plus puissant supposant que la pornographie et la philosophie appartiennent à des univers parfaitement hétérogènes, tant sur le plan de la finalité que de la légitimité. S’appuyant notamment sur les travaux de Robert Darnton, cette Philosophie des pornographes rappelle que, du point de vue de l’histoire du livre et de la circulation des textes manuscrits et imprimés sous l’Ancien Régime, les récits libertins, licencieux ou obscènes appartiennent au même ensemble que les textes philosophiques hétérodoxes: celui de la littérature clandestine, la notion d’« ouvrage philosophique » pouvant alors désigner aussi bien un essai tel que De l’esprit d’Helvétius ou les traités du baron d’Holbach qu’une fiction pornographique telle que Thérèse philosophe. Or, loin d’être marginale, cette production romanesque eut un succès considérable: Le Portier des Chartreux et Thérèse philosophe en particulier font alors partie des livres les plus demandés et leur rôle ne saurait dès lors être négligé dans la diffusion des idées philosophiques au siècle des Lumières. Car la caractéristique de

ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University Critiques 285 ces œuvres pornographiques est qu’elles intègrent très souvent au récit d’aventures amoureuses et sexuelles des dissertations philosophiques refusant les interdits religieux et moraux pesant sur la sexualité, érigeant la nature en principe de légitimation, et faisant ainsi un large écho aux discours les plus audacieux de la philosophie des Lumières. Comme le montre parfaitement Duflo, l’entrelacement de la repré sentation des scènes érotiques et des développements critiques et théoriques n’a, de fait, rien de fortuit et mérite examen: il ne s’agit nullement de couvrir les ébats sexuels d’un manteau philosophique propre à les rendre plus acceptables puisque ces dissertations hétérodoxes ne sont pas moins prohibées que ces tableaux lascifs. Il ne s’agit pas non plus d’une inadvertance ou d’une maladresse de littérateurs n’ayant pas pris garde qu’à être inséré dans un récit pornographique, le didactisme philosophique risquerait d’en contredire les effets érotiques, détournant l’œuvre « de sa finalité première » comme le supposait naguère Jean- Marie Goulemot dans son essai sur Ces Livres qu’on ne lit que d’une main (Minerve, 1994). La dimension idéologique et philosophique de ces textes n’est nullement étrangère à leur projet pornographique souligne justement Duflo qui invite à envisager ces œuvres comme des dispositifs doublement subversifs: le privilège accordé à l’expérience sexuelle vaut à la fois comme incitation à la volupté et émancipation à l’égard des préjugés. Nul hasard, dès lors, si le cloître devient un lieu de prédilection pour la fiction libertine. Certes, le thème n’est pas neuf: depuis les fabliaux du Moyen Age jusqu’aux contes de La Fontaine en passant par les nouvelles de Boccace, toute une tradition grivoise trouve dans la licence supposée des mœurs conventuelles une matière inépuisable. Mais à partir de La Religieuse en chemise de Chavigny de la Bretonnière (1683), le couvent apparaît non seulement comme un lieu topique mais comme l’espace emblématique de cette rencontre entre philosophie et pornographie. En un reversement ironique et polémique, le roman licencieux transforme le cloître, lieu de l’ascèse spirituelle et de l’interdit sexuel, en un espace préservé où les esprits s’éclairent et où les corps s’émancipent: au cours des trois Entretiens qui composent le roman de Chavigny, s’entremêlent savoirs libertins et baisers « à la florentine », sœur Angélique enseignant à sa jeune disciple, sœur Agnès, la philosophie des « personnes éclairées », que résume la célèbre devise de Cremonini « intus ut libet, foris ut moris est ». À l’abri du cloître, se développe tout à la fois une critique de l’institution du couvent et une philosophie de la nature « pure et innocente » que les deux sœurs converses s’empressent de mettre en pratique en se procurant mutuellement des plaisirs voluptueux dépourvus de toute culpabilité. Réfutant, en son lieu même, le modèle ascétique, le roman philosophico- pornographique célèbre le rôle de la volupté dans le développement de l’être humain. Encore faut-il ne pas s’y tromper: dans La Religieuse en chemise, dans Dom B***, Portier des Chartreux, dans Thérèse philosophe,

ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University 286 Reviews et dans bien d’autres romans, souligne Duflo, il ne s’agit pas de susciter les frissons du blasphème et de la transgression. Si le couvent s’impose alors à l’imaginaire pornographique avec une telle évidence, c’est avant tout parce qu’il est perçu comme un lieu contre-nature où la sexualité est d’autant plus débridée qu’elle est plus durement réprimée. Il s’agit dans ces romans de décrire une éducation à la volupté invitant à s’affranchir de toute culpabilité et à s’émanciper de toutes les normes antinaturelles. Tant il est vrai, comme le dit Dom Bougre dans Le Portier des Chartreux, que « l’amour dissipe bien des préjugés ». Tout au long des treize chapitres du livre, l’enquête de Duflo alterne heureusement les considérations générales et les analyses d’œuvres singulières (Le Portier des Chartreux, Thérèse philosophe, Les Bijoux indiscrets, les romans de Sade) et frappe par sa rigueur (non dénuée d’humour), sa clarté, sa pertinence. Duflo souligne à quel point ces romans philosophico-pornographiques, dont l’idéologie est loin de se réduire au militantisme athée, ont joué un rôle essentiel dans la diffusion d’une tradition érudite et confidentielle qui remonte à la Renaissance et puise son inspiration notamment chez Hobbes et Spinoza. Mais il montre surtout que le roman clandestin à ambition philosophique vise à produire un ébranlement à la fois physique, moral et intellectuel sur le lecteur. D’où la contribution décisive de ces textes trop longtemps écartés de l’histoire des idées à l’effort sans doute le plus central des Lumières consistant, sur le modèle de l’épicurisme lucrétien, à dissiper les vaines craintes, à désacraliser les croyances, à interroger les fondements et la validité des normes, à explorer le champ des possibles. Le livre de Duflo se clôt sur une série de trois chapitres consacrés à Sade. À l’évidence, le roman sadien se situe dans le prolongement direct de cette esthétique de « l’hybridité » (61) visant à déstabiliser le lecteur par l’entrelacement de tableaux obscènes, de dissertations philosophiques et de discours pamphlétaires. Duflo insiste néanmoins sur le « détournement d’héritage » (231) opéré par Sade qui réintroduit au centre de son dispositif une dimension transgressive que les romans philosophico-pornographiques des Lumières s’employaient au contraire à écarter au profit d’une visée déculpabilisante. La transgression étant, chez Sade, condition de la jouissance, l’intensivisme érotique entre en conflit avec un amoralisme philosophique qui nie la possibilité même du crime. Chez Sade, la dissertation athée dit sans doute « le vrai » mais seule celle qui affirme l’existence de Dieu, de la religion ou de la morale pour mieux en bafouer les lois peut conduire à l’orgie. Si, chez Sade, la jouissance a besoin des normes que l’amoralisme athée des scélérats ne cesse de nier, alors l’acte sexuel ne saurait plus être, comme il l’était dans Le Portier des Chartreux ou Thérèse philosophe, l’accomplissement en somme naturel du discours philosophique. Encore pourrait-on préciser, comme l’a bien montré naguère Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor dans ses analyses sur l’érotisme

ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University Critiques 287 de tête et la sexualisation de la pensée chez Sade (Le Plaisir de la pensée [PUF, 1992]), que l’acte sexuel n’est jamais, pour le libertin sadien, une fin en soi. Si méticuleuse soit-elle, jamais la réalisation de l’acte sexuel dans l’orgie ne saurait rivaliser avec la puissance du fantasme et de la pensée (et en ce sens, on comprend mieux que Rousseau ne soit pas seulement pour Sade la cible d’une insistante ironie mais aussi un modèle qu’il ne cesse de pasticher: chez l’un et l’autre, jamais la réalité ne vaut « les chimères » de la pensée, comme le dit Belmor à Juliette). À bien des égards, la pensée, chez Sade, est le substitut de l’acte. L’apathie sadienne suppose, en effet, de convertir l’excitation libidinale en un érotisme de tête et une jouissance de la pensée. D’où sans doute la relative indifférence de Sade à l’égard de la cohérence philosophique des énoncés qu’il attribue à ses libertins: car chez le scélérat, c’est moins le contenu de la pensée ou même sa dimension transgressive qui fait naître le plaisir, que la sexualisation du processus même de la pensée dans sa dimension d’argumentation logique et de démonstration persuasive (notamment en ce qu’elle permet d’exercer une emprise perverse sur le désir de l’autre): « il y a là une situation extrême où l’activité intellectuelle non seulement est source d’une excitation sexuelle mais comporte en soi une satisfaction sexuelle » (Le plaisir de la pensée, 299). Certes, Duflo ne manque pas de le suggérer incidemment, en particulier à propos de Noirceuil chez qui « l’échange dissertatif lui-même devient une jouissance criminelle en soi » (272). Mais il aurait pu être opportun de souligner une vertu essentielle du roman sadien: celle de mettre en lumière la pertinence de la proposition inverse à l’idée selon laquelle l’acte sexuel, dans le roman philosophico- pornographique, est le complément logique voire l’accomplissement naturel des thèses philosophiques énoncées. Dans le roman clandestin, l’activité réflexive est aussi, en effet, le lieu d’une intense sexualisation, ainsi que le montre exemplairement, en particulier, l’extase de la pensée dont Agnès fait l’expérience dans La Religieuse en chemise et que Duflo cite p. 91: « Ah! que je suis ravie de t’entendre! L’extrême plaisir que j’y ai pris m’a empêchée de t’interrompre, et cette liberté de conscience que tu commences à me rendre par ton discours me décharge d’un nombre presque infini de peines qui me tourmentaient ». L’équivoque plaisante des termes que Chavigny attribue à son héroïne laisse assez bien percevoir que, dans cette littérature, l’exercice de la pensée ne vaut pas seulement comme légitimation du plaisir mais bien aussi comme une expérience intellectuelle conduisant à un véritable « transport » dépassant les possibilités entrevues par le désir: n’est-ce pas la définition même de la jouissance? Ce n’est pas le moindre mérite du livre de Duflo que de nous inviter à réévaluer ces œuvres et à apprécier à leur juste mesure ces plaisirs de l’esprit.

Christophe Martin est Professeur à la Faculté des Lettres de Sorbonne Université.

Modèles et fiction à l’âge classique et au Siècle des Lumières par Françoise Gevrey Honoré Champion, 2019. 446pp. €42.65. ISBN 978-2745-349606. Critique littéraire par Éric Francalanza, Université de Brest L’ouvrage présente une anthologie des travaux de l’auteur, et en possède les qualités principales: exemplarité dans le choix des sujets, complétude sur la question proposée, construction d’un cheminement à la fois critique et didactique, encadrement par une présentation, un index et une bibliographie, actualité scientifique. Composé de vingt-six articles, dont un inédit, distribués dans cinq chapitres, que présente un avant- propos précis et concis de Jean-Louis Haquette, l’ensemble couvre certes l’âge classique et les Lumières, mais envisage également, dans le dernier chapitre, « Lectures au xixe siècle » (371–423), quelques continuités majeures, de Stendhal (lecteur de Montesquieu) aux frères Goncourt (lecteurs de La Bruyère) en passant par Flaubert (lecteur de Bernardin de Saint-Pierre), ce que ne laisse pas présumer le cadre chronologique du titre, mais qui se révèle d’une heureuse cohérence (quand la narration et les auteurs de l’ère classique, lato sensu, deviennent « modèles »). La question des rapports de la fiction à ses modèles, qu’ils relèvent de la narration ou du théâtre, constitue le cœur du volume. Aussi bien la notion de modèle est-elle déclinée dans toute sa polysémie: sont tout autant explorés les sources et les intertextes que les rapports entre texte et hypotexte dans le cas de la parodie et de toutes les formes de translation générique, que les relations à la traduction dans le cadre de la mimesis, que le degré de conformité aux théories du temps, que la théorisation même des écrivains (préfaces, notamment) qui cherchent à définir les genres qu’ils mettent en œuvre, tant sont fluctuantes, nous le savons, les appellations génériques à cette époque (histoire, roman, nouvelle, anecdote, conte ...). Ce sont là perspectives capitales que croisent la plupart des enquêtes pour dégager avec rigueur la singularité des œuvres et leur inscription dans une histoire des genres, formes et styles. Les écarts, décalages, variations, transformations et autres modifications sont autant de moyens de mesurer les faits de réécriture et, plus généralement, le rapport aux modèles aussi bien avoués qu’implicites, et de s’interroger sur ce qui fait le sens particulier d’une œuvre ou d’un style. Il suffira de (re)lire l’étude consacrée à cet étonnant « cas-limite » qu’est la Brochure nouvelle de G. de Mondorge pour saisir la portée de cette méthodologie (353–67). Car c’est bien une des vertus de l’anthologie que de faire apparaître une méthodologie en action, implacablement efficace. Bref, le livre présente un travail d’autant plus complet qu’il a été, rappelons-le, mûri de longues années (les publications couvrent, inédit évidemment mis à part, les années 1980 à 2011), et qu’il permet de retrouver, en renfort de L’Illusion et ses procédés. De La Princesse de

Clèves aux Illustres Françaises, publié chez Corti en 1988, et d’éditions de textes comme celle des Textes critiques d’Houdar de La Motte réalisée avec B. Guion (Champion, 2002), des études majeures abordant les questions fondamentales que pose le rapport de la fiction à ses modèles entre 1678 et 1792. Plus spécifiquement, les articles traitent des écrivains et œuvres de prédilection de l’auteur (Mme de Lafayette, Courtilz de Sandras, Robert Challe, Houdar de La Motte, et c’est à lui qu’elle consacre l’inédit), mais ils traversent également tout le xviiie siècle en prenant appui sur le xviie: Lesage, Marivaux, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Prévost, Crébillon, Rousseau, Diderot, Saint-Lambert, Laclos, Florian, sans compter de moins illustres comme Gautier de Mondorge ou Louis d’Ussieux, ou encore des travaux sériels de nature tantôt thématique, comme sur l’enfance du héros dans la nouvelle classique (69–78) ou la peur du temps dans les contes du xviiie siècle (313–33), tantôt générique, comme sur la réécriture dans les romans de la seconde moitié du xviie siècle (70–90) ou la notion d’aventure chez Mme de Lafayette (29–43). Aucun des auteurs du xviiie siècle n’est envisagé sans l’arrière-plan que fournit à l’auteur sa connaissance approfondie des conteurs et romanciers du xviie, qu’il s’agisse du roman héroïque ou baroque, de la nouvelle historique ou galante. Chaque étude fait dialoguer les siècles et les périodes, et saisit l’inscription de l’œuvre dans la dynamique qu’elle provoque, fût-elle celle d’un genre subversif comme le conte, puisqu’ainsi se reconfigurent, à un degré que F. Gevrey évalue chaque fois avec précision, l’esthétique et l’histoire des genres. Car c’est bien là que les travaux excellent: la poétique n’est pas simple affaire de théorie, elle est pierre de touche pour cerner l’évolution des formes et des genres littéraires et, plus sensiblement encore, de la morale. L’intrication de la morale, parfois de la philosophie (Montesquieu pour la politique, 151–68; Voltaire et Prévost pour la métaphysique, 183–98; Rousseau pour la religion, 247–57), et de la poétique, se révèle le fil conducteur de la plupart des enquêtes. L’ensemble permet de dégager un panorama des évolutions esthétiques à partir de cas concrets bien ordonnés (rappelons, il est temps, quels sont les titres des quatre premiers chapitres: I. Poétique de la nouvelle du xviie siècle II. Le Roman et ses modèles au xviiie siècle III. Réflexions sur les genres IV. Le Conte), et soigneusement choisis, soit pour leur valeur historique et littéraire, soit pour leur exemplarité (la question du personnage, entre autres), soit pour l’ambiguïté de leur statut littéraire, soit pour l’utilité d’un questionnement qui, de prime abord, peut paraître insolite, comme l’étude du conte dans les Liaisons dangereuses (335–352). Dans cet ordre d’idées, on peut aussi avoir à l’esprit l’« entreprise extrême par la volonté de dépouillement et de concentration » (16) qu’est la nouvelle Éléonore d’Yvrée de C. Bernard, sorte de limite au-delà de laquelle le genre devait se réformer. L’auteur propose également un article sur les Apparences trompeuses, qu’elle estime être de Courtilz de Sandras (61–67): la méthodologie générale

ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University 290 Reviews permet d’établir des critères viables d’attribution, tout en y intégrant, comme il se doit, données éditoriales et datation de la composition. On sera aussi sensible aux rapports que la fiction entretient avec le théâtre, comme dans les Illustres Françaises de Robert Challe (201–17) dont l’étude précède celle de « La théâtralité dans les Nouvelles Françaises de Louis d’Ussieux » (219–31), mais aussi avec les périodiques (Florian, 233–45), ou encore à l’inédit sur Houdar de La Motte qui pose avec acuité le problème d’une définition de la fable (273–95). Des fils mènent subtilement d’un article à l’autre: ainsi, par exemple, du « Discours sur la réécriture dans les romans de la seconde moitié du xviie siècle » (79–90), qui clôt le chapitre II, on passe sans heurt au « personnage introuvable » qu’est Gil Blas, sorte de fantôme littéraire (93–110), avant d’en venir à une autre forme de l’expérimentation romanesque, celle d’une « Poétique de l’obscur dans La Vie de Marianne » (111–22). En somme, l’ouvrage répond à ce que l’on attend d’un florilège d’articles proposé par un chercheur chevronné: on y lit aussi bien des pages profondes dont la valeur critique demeure d’actualité qu’un cheminement cohérent, et parfois surprenant, d’article en article, pérégrination stimulante dans le labyrinthe de la création romanesque de l’âge classique et du siècle des Lumières, éclairé par le style fluide d’un esprit clair et sensible.

Éric Francalanza est Professeur des Universités (Littérature française) à l’Université de Brest.

Les Lumières catholiques et le roman français, éd. Isabelle Tremblay Voltaire Foundation; Liverpool UP, 2018. 382pp. £65. ISBN 978-1-786-94141-1. Critique littéraire par Sylviane Albertan-Coppola, Université de Picardie Jules Verne (Amiens) La faible place accordée aux romans catholiques dans les études con sacrées à ce qu’il est convenu d’appeler les Anti-Lumières justifiait pleine ment que l’on y dédiât tout un ouvrage. De ce point de vue-là, les onze articles qui composent le volume remplissent parfaitement leur rôle. Des écrivain(e)s peu connu(e)s comme Moncrif, Loquet, d’Arconville, ou même plus étudié(e)s ces dernières années comme Beaumont, Genlis, Gérard, sont ainsi justement mis en lumière pour leur contribution à l’histoire du roman français. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre trouve aussi sa place dans le corpus en tant que « philosophe catholique » pour la « double théodicée » contenue dans Paul et Virginie (article de Marco Menin). On ne peut donc que saluer l’important apport aux recherches dix-huitiémistes que constitue ce recueil dirigé de main de maître par Isabelle Tremblay.

On s’aperçoit, à parcourir les analyses minutieuses des spécialistes réunis autour de ce projet, que non seulement le roman à caractère religieux (qu’on le nomme édifiant, apologétique ou simplement catholique) connaît une vaste diffusion dans la République des lettres mais qu’il est loin d’être coupé du mouvement des Lumières. D’après Alicia C. Montoya, Stéphanie de Genlis offre une intéressante synthèse des principes catholiques et des valeurs civiques des Lumières. Jeanne- Marie Leprince de Beaumont se situe selon I. Tremblay à « la croisée du roman édifiant et du discours réformiste des philosophes », ce qui explique à mon sens que la critique l’ait tantôt classée dans le camp des Anti-Lumières, tantôt tirée du côté de la pensée progressiste des Lumières. F.-A. de Paradis de Moncrif suit également, démontre Valentina Denzel, « un parcours entre catholicisme et philosophie des Lumières », centré sur ce qu’on pourrait appeler « la galanterie chrétienne », qui s’appuie sur la croyance en la bonté humaine et l’importance de la raison. La réflexion sur le bonheur représente ainsi une sorte de« passerelle entre les Lumières et les anti-Lumières » dans les Entretiens de Clotilde (1788) de Marie-Françoise Loquet visant, explique Marylise Turgeon Solis, à contrer les effets d’une littérature anti-monastique en pleine expansion à la fin du siècle. Mais l’intérêt majeur de ce rassemblement de contributions diverses réside dans la réflexion qui court d’un article à l’autre, quel que soit l’auteur(e) considéré(e) ou l’angle d’approche choisi, sur le rapport entre la raison et la foi. C’est sur ce point que l’ouvrage comporte le plus d’avancées. Tou(te)s les romancier(e)s ne se contentent pas, en effet comme Genlis de tenter de réconcilier la foi religieuse avec le rationalisme des Lumières ou de s’annexer comme Gérard le concept de lumières. Certain(e)s apportent des réponses plus subtiles et originales au problème de la compatibilité de la foi avec la raison. Comme le montre Ramona Herz-Gazeau, Beaumont fonde son apologétique à la fois sur les idées de Descartes et celles de Pascal: la raison est capable grâce à la (bonne) philosophie de découvrir la vérité, en écartant les obstacles élevés par la foi. Le chapitre de Lenglet-Dufresnoy, qu’examine Jan Herman, revisite d’autre part l’opposition traditionnelle entre imagination et entendement en saluant l’efficacité des légendes chrétiennes qui ont inspiré à nos pères de bons sentiments. La pédagogie de Genlis comme celle de Beaumont est fondée sur une conception lockéenne du contact de l’enfant avec le monde, tout en soutenant une conception théocentrique du monde. De là à conclure à l’existence de « lumières catholiques », il n’y a qu’un pas, que la directrice de l’ouvrage et plusieurs de ses collègues n’hésitent pas à franchir. Certain(e)s parlent, de manière plus large, de « religious Enlightenment ». D’autres, comme Paul Pelckmans, utilisent la formule

« christianisme éclairé ». Mais si le roman religieux méritait d’être réhabilité et si cet ouvrage répond remarquablement à cette attente, il est permis de se demander si c’est lui rendre parfaitement justice que de l’apprécier à l’aune des critères des Lumières. Jean Deprun posait déjà la question dans son article fondateur de 1973 sur les Anti-Lumières dans l’Histoire de la philosophie (t. II) parue dans la Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Nous la reprenions en 2002 dans le numéro spécial (34) de la revue Dix-huitième siècle portant sur « Christianisme et Lumières », sans parvenir toutefois à trouver le terme adéquat pour désigner toute cette littérature du XVIIIe siècle (roman mais aussi poésie et théâtre, ou encore dictionnaires, pensées, livres de sciences) largement diffusée qui s’attache résolument à défendre la religion en danger sans pour autant s’enfermer dans une austérité morale rébarbative. Le marquis de Caraccioli se faisait apologiste riant pour ne pas ennuyer ses lecteurs mondains. L’abbé Gérard, comme le fait ressortir ici Nicolas Brucker, tente la difficile synthèse entre espérance chrétienne et bonheur céleste. Il est certain qu’au XVIIIe siècle le soupçon d’incompatibilité entre roman et religion se dissipe fortement, même si, comme le souligne Fabrice Preyat, le pari de revivifier une « littérature catholique empesée » n’est pas tenu. La mise en scène des tensions entre passion et morale, note Marie-Laure Girou Swiderski, n’est pourtant pas très éloignée de celle d’un Prévost ou d’un Marivaux dans le roman-mémoires de Geneviève Thiroux d’Arconville, Mémoires de Mademoiselle de Valcourt (1767). Paradoxalement, ce nouvel esprit trouve dans le roman un bon terrain d’expression par la place qu’il accorde à l’intériorité. Ce n’est pas à des débats intellectuels convenus que nous convient les romancier(e)s mais aux interrogations d’une foi vécue par les personnages. La fiction se prête également—Prévost l’avait soutenu dans l’avis préliminaire de Manon Lescaut (1731)—à la mise en exercices de la morale. En mettant ainsi en avant la sphère de l’intime, le roman catholique participe à sa manière à l’avènement du roman moderne, celui de Mauriac en particulier. Sylviane Albertan-Coppola est professeur émérite de littérature française à l’Université de Picardie Jules Verne (Amiens). Ses recherches portent sur trois domaines principaux: les « Anti-Lumières », les récits de voyage, Diderot et l’Encyclopédie.

Grammars of Approach: Landscape, Narrative, and the Linguistic Picturesque by Cynthia Wall University of Chicago Press, 2019. $35. ISBN 978-0226467832350. Review by Alison Conway, University of British Columbia, Okanagan When I opened Cynthia Wall’s book, the first thing I noticed was a small “ix” in the right-hand margin, a third of the way down the page, next to the first line of text. It took me a minute to figure it out—what a surprise to find a page number just there! This was the first of many moments I was drawn to look closely at the page while reading Grammars of Approach, a study that argues that “marks on the page ... can be quite sophisticated and deliberate constructors of nonlexical meaning” (136). How often do we stop reading to attend to the font on the front and back covers of a book? Such are the pleasures of Wall’s wonderful study, and kudos to the University of Chicago Press for the care it has taken in its production. Grammars of Approach describes a transformation in landscape theory that shifts attention from the object of the approach (the house) to the perception of the viewer. The turn in landscape architecture was mirrored by changing theories and practices of print and syntax, allow ing Wall to use the transformation of “approach” from verb to noun as the starting point for a broader cultural history. Through her study of the topographies of “land, page, and narrative,” Wall reflects on how the movement from “the grand straight avenue ... to the winding approach” manifests the aesthetics of the picturesque (17). “The term ‘picturesque,’” Wall confesses, “is used shamelessly loosely throughout the book” (6). But its celebration of “the irregular, the textured, the oblique, the unexpected, the interruptive” allows it to capture the dynamics this study wants to examine (6). Wall begins with those elements of the architectural approach that are central to the study as a whole: its shift of emphasis from landowner to observer, from linear to winding, from emblem to plot. Humphry Repton, writing and working in the moment between Capability Brown and picturesque theorists Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight, is a key player in Wall’s story, “a historical and a metaphorical representation of the root system” connecting a larger pattern of transformations across landscape, page, and narrative (24). Repton’s Red Books, “exquisitely crafted collections of water colors, ground plans, and copperplate-hand descriptions bound in red morocco,” teach their readers a new “narrative of motion” (31). The conclusion of chapter 1 introduces us to the eighteenth- century novel’s “approach,” beginning with Anna Letitia Barbauld’s account of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa as a “long avenue” to an “old mansion” (40). Wall argues that Clarissa’s plot, in fact, “is both avenue and approach, inescapable and recombinant, direct and deviating” (42). Analyzing Clarissa here highlights how “picturesque” designates a way of reading as well as a

ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University 294 Reviews historical reference point in Grammars of Approach, a way of looking for, as well as at, the “fantastic roots of trees” in unexpected places (26). Chapter 2 shifts from the psychology of approach to its prepositional aspect, starting with the park gate lodge. “When we slow down and look around and between instead of simply straight ahead,” Wall notes, “things like the park gate lodge swing into view” (57). The topographical view so popular in the eighteenth century allows appendages to the great house, like the park gate lodge, to “tell their stories” (80). The small building “initiates the Relations of Place between entrance and end” (50). Frances Burney’s Camilla provides a narrative representation of the park gate lodge’s effects, revealing how characters navigate thresholds: “It opens the gate quite literally to a flurry of narrative and psychological approaches to the house” (57). The chapter concludes with a wonderful reading of the London Bridge’s clearance in the middle of the eighteenth century, a transformation that revealed “how much lay in between the Great Stone Gate and the City itself” (89). The “linguistic picturesque” serves as the focus of chapters 3 and 4, which study, respectively, the “topography of the page” and “the eighteenth-century landscape of grammar” (92, 139). Wall reveals what lies beneath surface, exposing the “underground picturesque” lurking below the “smooth, uniform text” that emerged in the new fonts of the eighteenth century (93). The reading of fonts reveals the importance of reading the page as a three-dimensional object in order to grasp the spatial aspect of print. (This chapter also inspired me to write and submit my review in Baskerville—such is the infectious nature of Wall’s engagement with her objects.) In the world of prose fiction, Richardson’s expertise as a printer afforded him a particular kind of intimacy with punctuation, and Wall demonstrates how these innovations shape Clarissa’s plot. Chapter 4 moves from the period to the periodic sentence, revealing how “the typographical made room ... for the grammatical” (145). Again, Wall complicates the narrative of increasing conformity—grammar’s obsession with politeness and order—by demonstrating how the proliferation of grammars “enabled other low, trivial Things to come into view” (143). With a wonderful neologism worthy of Richardson himself, Wall shows how “the Clarissian preposition delicately leverages our attention from the center of noun and verb to the spaces in between” (161, emphasis added). Wall’s illuminating readings of novels illustrate larger cultural claims in each of the first four chapters ofGrammars of Approach. In chapter 5, she turns to prose fiction as the primary object of study. The formatting and syntax of the prose of Bunyan, Defoe, and Haywood lay the foundation for the later patterns of Burney, Radcliffe, and Austen, which reveal how the periodic sentence “behaves as a kind of syntactic approach” (193). Free indirect discourse serves as the culminating point, the “psycholiterary

ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University Critiques 295 equivalent of the approach” (217). Surprisingly, given Wall’s critical acumen, for me this chapter proved less engaging than the previous four, perhaps because it lacked the charm of discovery made possible by the alignment of literary close readings with non-literary theories and practices. The short space allotted for this review cannot begin to do justice to the range of fascinating objects examined by Wall’s study, its breadth and depth of knowledge, and the insights generated by its brilliant readings of the novels of Richardson (Clarissa, in particular), Radcliffe, Burney, Austen, and others.Grammars of Approach reveals how interdisciplinary work can provide us not only with an understanding but also with a sense of the long eighteenth century. This book places us in the middle distance of approach, bringing into view less familiar cultural objects and allowing us to see old favourites from different vantage points and with fresh eyes.

Alison Conway is Professor of English, and Gender and Women’s Studies, at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. She is the author of Private Interests: Women, Portraiture, and the Visual Culture of the English Novel, 1709– 1791 (2001) and The Protestant Whore: Courtesan Narrative and Religious Controversy in England, 1680–1750 (2010).

Servants and the Gothic, 1764–1841: A Half-told Tale by Kathleen Hudson University of Wales Press, 2019. 252pp. £34.99. ISBN 978-1786830319. Review by Elizabeth Neiman, University of Maine Servants in long-eighteenth-century gothics are peripheral and yet ever-present; they act as appendages to protagonists and villains alike. Kathleen Hudson draws this stock figure out from the shadows, show ing how servants perform a protean identity that destabilizes master narratives about Enlightenment selfhood and society. Hudson breaks new ground with her contention that servants—as liminal figures that raise uneasy questions about identity—are metafictional devices and even authorial metonyms. Beginning with Horace Walpole’s debt in The Castle of Otranto (1764) to Shakespearean comic servants, Hudson pairs gothic novels with theatrical adaptations to call attention to the physicality of performance, even in prose. In examining the “convention” of the hidden manuscript, for example, Hudson shows that servants frequently appear as actual artifacts, as living and breathing manuscripts. As they tell their stories to the eager protagonist, they perform rela tionships between authors and readers. Hudson’s introduction identifies the gothic’s preoccupation with servant storytellers as part and product of generally widespread anxieties among the middle and upper classes

ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University 296 Reviews in a rapidly changing commercial economy. Throughout the book, Hudson illustrates that gothic novels reproduce the expected—didac tically faithful or villainous servants—and yet simultaneously, whether wittingly or not, also “Gothicize” these stereotypes through servants’ performances of social class and gender. These performances, which often seem emotional and irrational, blur boundaries between self/other and master/servant. Tracing how this unsettling performance plays out across a wide literary field, Hudson contributes to recent work that illuminates commonalities among so-called “masculine” and “feminine” gothics and “market-driven” and “political” ones. Servants and the Gothic is ambitious in its reach. Hudson looks both before and beyond the eighteenth-century and Romantic-era gothic to suggest that its servant storytellers recall pre-Enlightenment folklore even while exerting a proto-postmodern tug on dominant narratives with continued resonance today (see her reading of Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049). Of particular importance is the assessment in chapter 2 of popular gothics like Ann Radcliffe’s alongside political ones by William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, as this comparison shows that in popular and political texts alike, servants unsettle dominant narratives (both in-text and contextually). Hudson builds on this framework in chapter 3 by reminding us that the imposing and handsome Moor of Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya (1808) is, after all, a servant. As the Devil in disguise, Zofloya intentionally performs servility. This performance is increasingly clear to readers, though not to the imperious anti-heroine Victoria, whose own (unwitting) performance as mistress leads her to lose control of herself and her narrative. As Hudson underscores, Zofloya’s performance of servitude underwrites Victoria’s downfall, making Zofloya an authorial figure. Hudson establishes that Dacre’s variation on the stock-gothic servant as storyteller enables her to recycle stereotypes about blackness as dangerous and Other, in contrast to abolitionist literature, in which Black characters appear as victims and abolitionists as saviours. Hudson infers that Zofloya’s performance of servility and his eventual mastery over Victoria destabilizes this binary, constructed by white British authors, that distinguishes the white British subject from African Other, whether that Other is figured as demon or victim. Servants are so pervasive by the 1810s, Hudson contends in the final chapter, that whether present or absent, the servant figure sparks innovations. First, Hudson notes the further popularizing of the form via chapbooks (“trade gothics” are much shorter than gothic novels and are often by anonymous and obscure authors). Second, she identifies second-generation Romantics like Walter Scott, James Hogg, and Mary Shelley, who use gothic conventions to forge new ground. Hudson evaluates Scott’s historical romances of the late 1810s and 1820s, Hogg’s metatextual The Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), and Shelley’s Frankenstein (both the 1818 and 1831 versions), along with Richard Brinsley Peake’s 1823

ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University Critiques 297 theatrical adaptation, Presumption; or the Fate of Frankenstein. But Hudson does not fully mix this otherwise intoxicating cocktail of late Romantic gothics, raising the question in particular of how chapbooks of the sort that influenced both Percy and Mary Shelley might contribute to their own literary output. Additionally, perhaps because of trying to include so much, Hudson misses the opportunity to connect this analysis more explicitly to what came previously: how might the blurring between Frankenstein and his creature relate to her discussion about race as performance in Zofloya? In our present political climate, and in the wake of movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, Hudson’s compelling claims about servants in the gothic are particularly timely, illuminating a hidden nar rative that is nonetheless, for some readers, in plain view. Hudson con vincingly shows that the servant figure in gothics is underestimated by scholars—and suggests that this figure might also have been misread in its day. Though expansive, this argument is at times unevenly executed, both (as in chapter 4) with how information is organized but also at times at the sentence level, where (though usually following an otherwise beautifully written synopsis) readers can be left to infer what precisely servant figures are adding to or showing of the larger sociopolitical nar ratives on display. Throughout, I found myself wishing that Hudson had more explicitly and consistently established how her study builds on emergent and ongoing conversations about the gothic, but also related topics like eighteenth-century print culture as an influence on Romanticism. To provide a few examples: might the servant’s protean identity (actuated through storytelling) provide a different route to “round” character than that which Deidre Shauna Lynch maps in The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture and the Business of Inner Meaning (1998)? And if so, with what implications for how we read and assess intersectional identities in eighteenth-century and Romantic-era texts? Or: what might Hudson’s reading of the blurring of boundaries between servants and masters as a racial performance add to recent explorations of counter-Enlightenment models for subjectivity, such as Deanna Koretsky’s award-winning essay “‘Unhallowed arts’: Frankenstein and the Poetics of Suicide” (European Romantic Review 26, no. 2 [2015]: 241–60)? And: could this reading contribute to recent efforts to map blackness back into Romanticism, given how, as Bakary Diaby points out, scholars continue to treat blackness as “generally in Romanticism but not of it” (“Black Women and/in the Shadow of Romanticism,” European Romantic Review 30, no. 3 [2019]: 251). Also: most of the texts that Hudson analyzes are by authors of whom we know a great deal, but other period gothics from popular Minerva novels to chapbooks are often by anonymous or obscure authors—if, as Hudson argues, servants sometimes appear as authorial metonyms that reveal new insights about the genre and its origin, do servant figures in

ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University 298 Reviews anonymous gothics take this line of commentary in new and possibly more pluralistic directions? Servants and the Gothic proves persuasive in its argument that the servant figure is a central if under-read presence in shaping the gothic mode. Hudson’s provocative thesis that servant performances unsettle dominant narratives will likely incite further research, for scholars of both the long eighteenth century and the Romantic era, and also for performance studies and gothic studies.

Elizabeth Neiman is an Associate Professor at the University of Maine; she is the author of Minerva’s Gothics: The Politics and Poetics of Romantic Exchange, 1780–1820 (2019).

The Sentimental Novel in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Albert J. Rivero Cambridge University Press, 2019. 258pp. $114.95. ISBN 978-1108418928. Review by Jennifer Golightly, Colorado College and University of Denver As Albert J. Rivero writes in his introduction, the sentimental novel helped shape the conventions that characterize the English novel as we think of it today. This collection includes essays that make explicit the ways in which the sentimental novel informs or connects with other novelistic genres as well as with currents of thought in the eighteenth century, particularly scientific and empirical thought. The aim of this volume is thus to present “various aspects and contexts for thinking about the genre” while also pointing toward areas for further research (11). The flexibility of theme gives the authors freedom to imagine the ways in which eighteenth-century authors and texts worked with and against the conventions of the sentimental novel: for example, how authors such as Frances Burney and Sophia Lee found the genre effective as a way of exploring questions about women’s suffering after the apex of the form’s popularity in the early nineteenth century, as Melissa Sodeman argues, or how the gothic novel both used and repudiated the conventions of sentimental literature, as Hannah Doherty Hudson suggests. The unifying point of the collection is that all the essays provide some new way of thinking about the sentimental novel in the eighteenth century. The volume offers updated approaches and, in many cases, revisions to existing scholarship on the topic. Particularly valuable is the move away from a single national literature as focus, evidenced by inclusions such as Gillian Dow’s essay on the French sentimental tradition, Maureen Harkin’s comparative analysis of The Man of Feeling and The Sorrows of Young Werther, and Joseph Bartolomeo’s essay on the sentimental novel in North America with a focus on novels by Hannah Webster Foster, Susanna Rowson, Frances Brooke, and William Hill Brown. Because of the breadth of the connections it makes, scholars

ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University Critiques 299 working on a variety of topics in the long eighteenth century will find this volume useful, particularly those working on empiricism in the novel, scholars interested in sentimental modes of writing in Germany or France, those learning about the deployment of the sentimental novel for political purposes, scholars working on the depiction of slavery and the slave trade in the novel, or students interested in the legacy of the sentimental novel in the nineteenth century. The volume includes twelve essays on a range of topics, beginning at the start of the long eighteenth century with early prose fictions by Eliza Haywood and Penelope Aubin and moving through the first quarter of the nineteenth century and the publication of Sophia Lee’s The Life of a Lover, Frances Burney’s The Wanderer (1814), and Jane Austen’s Sanditon (1817) and Persuasion (1818). Many of the essays examine the sentimental novel’s connections to other forms of eighteenth-century fiction, such as the gothic novel, prose fiction, epistolary novels, or the transatlantic novel. Some of the essays I most enjoyed in the collection problematized the sentimental novel or the heroes of these novels, as the contributions by Sodeman, Barbara M. Benedict, Brycchan Carey, and Rivero all do. However, all of the essays changed or added to my understanding of the sentimental novel in the eighteenth century in some way. For example, Ros Ballaster’s essay situates prose fictions within the context of the epistemological and scientific thought of the time, showing how amatory feelings and experiences were subjected in these fictions to the type of empirical modes that were characteristic of debates in natural science; and Bonnie Latimer’s essay provides a thoughtful analysis of the differences between proverbs, maxims, and moral sentiments in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa that opened a new way of reading the novel for me. Similarly, Jonathan Lamb’s essay, “Sterne’s Sentimental Empiricism,” offers an insightful juxtaposition of Hobbesian and Lockean materialism and their connection to sensation as they are evinced through Yorick in A Sentimental Journey (1768) and Tristram in Tristram Shandy (1759) that was rich with insight. I have only a trivial quibble with this collection. Though the first essay in the collection, Gary Kelly’s piece on politics and the sentimental novel, is intended to serve as a stage-setting piece that connects the sentimental novel to the political in a broad sense, most of the examples Kelly provides are drawn from the latter half of the century and particularly from the 1770s, 1780s, and 1790s. Rivero states in the introduction to the collection that the volume’s organization is “roughly chronological,” and so I can see a case for putting Kelly’s essay toward the end of the collection, perhaps prior to Hudson’s essay on the sentimental novel and gothic literature, or, for what might be a fascinating juxtaposition, next to Carey’s essay “Slavery and the Novel of Sentiment,” which discusses the unreliable nature of the sentimental novel “as a political tool” (138). The movement from Kelly’s

ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University 300 Reviews essay to Ballaster’s is not a huge leap, but it requires a bit of a shift on the part of the reader. This is not a major flaw, and I mention it primarily as a means of exploring the function of an essay like Kelly’s in the collection. Positioning Kelly’s essay closer to those essays examining late-century subgenres and texts might have been more provocative for making the kinds of connections that Kelly’s essay describes. New scholarship is most useful when it changes the way scholars and students think about genres and specific texts—when it has the potential to influence research and teaching. These changes do not have to be dramatic to be important. Small insights, updated ways of thinking about texts and genres that have been much studied, or a new approach to a popular text can be as significant to students and scholars as a wide-ranging study of literary history. I was pleased to find this collection to be in the category of truly useful volumes, one that I will want handy to refer to frequently as I work on any number of literatures in the long eighteenth century.

Jennifer Golightly is an applications specialist at Colorado College, and teaches research and writing at the University of Denver. She is the author of The Family, Marriage, and Radicalism in British Women’s Novels of the 1790s: Public Affection and Private Affliction (2011).

Psychocritique de Rousseau par Laurence Viglieno, éd. Éric Leborgne Hermann, 2019. 254pp. €27. ISBN 979-1037000989. Review by Ekaterina R. Alexandrova, University of Wyoming This volume collects eleven essays on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, pub lished by Laurence Viglieno over a forty-year span from 1974 to 2014. Few other writers generate such sustained levels of critical interest as Rousseau—2019 alone saw the appearance of at least five book-length studies and several new translations devoted to the “citizen of Geneva.” Viglieno’s contribution is a noteworthy addition to Rousseauist criticism, since her thoughtful analysis both brings attention to many neglected texts and offers original interpretations of some of Rousseau’s major works. Though the volume is accessible to novices, it is of particular interest to literary scholars and specialists of the eighteenth century. Viglieno does a good job of teasing out some of the nuances in Rousseau’s texts through close readings and the application of Freudian psychoanalytic criticism. While she adapts methods of literary analysis developed by the French literary critic Charles Mauron in L’Inconscient dans l’œuvre et la vie de Racine (1957) and Des métaphores obsédantes au mythe personnel (1962), her approach is also enriched by Melanie Klein’s work on early childhood

ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University Critiques 301 experiences. The essays combine Freudian and Kleinian hypotheses on the functioning of the unconscious with literary analysis in order to identify and explore the obsessive images and metaphorical networks present in Rousseau’s texts, such as the recurrent fantasy of being buried alive (“Le Fantasme de l’enterré vif dans les Rêveries, ou le ‘complexe du cyclope’” [1979]). However, as Viglieno remarks, it would be presumptuous to base a global interpretation of Rousseau on the identification of recurrent themes in his corpus, or to establish what Mauron calls “le mythe personnel de l’écrivain” (251). In this respect, her study of the evolution of Rousseau’s “dramaturgie interne” is more nuanced and considerate of the uniqueness of his writing than the at-times totalizing Freudian readings of Rousseau by well-known critics such as Jean Starobinski or Pierre-Paul Clément (251). The collection is divided into two parts. Part 1 groups together five essays on Rousseau’s play Narcissus, his autobiographical writing, and his correspondence. Part 2 comprises six essays, five of which are devoted to the Enlightenment bestseller La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), and one to Rousseau’s early work, specifically theatre. The first essay, “Narcisse auteur dramatique ou ‘pour introduire le narcissisme de Rousseau’” (1977), is one of the best in the collection, and its position at the head of the volume is propitious since it scrutinizes Rousseau’s complex relationship to his writing, as well as suggests latent themes that emerge throughout the writer’s later work, themes that are picked up by subsequent essays in the volume. In exploring Valère or the Narcissus’s submission to his fiancée Angélique, “cette femme manifestement maternelle, plus sage, plus mûre que lui,” Viglieno notes the aspiration for a pre-Oedipal fusion with the mother, and the intense need for a protective, maternal love that is revealed by this pursuit. The critic goes further, however, and suggests that the play presents the germ of two “tentations” that Rousseau will alternatively fight against or indulge in his later, better-known works: the return to childhood, and the refusal of sexual difference (31). Rousseau’s interest in childhood is hardly surprising, considering his writing on education and his Bildungsroman-type heroes such as Émile and Saint- Preux, or even his admission in the Confessions that he never managed to grow up. However, the argument that Rousseau’s dream of an absence of sexual difference is accompanied by a violent refusal of his own latent femininity is a striking one in regard to an author whose attitude toward women has been the subject of persistent critical debate. The fusion with the mother, and Rousseau’s relationship with the maternal body and his own physicality, is explored in another intriguing essay, “Le Fantasme de l’enterré vif.” Some of the more interesting essays in the collection likewise investigate the complicated relationship to the mother figure, most notably “‘Julie ou la nouvelle Eurydice’: mort et renaissance dans La Nouvelle Héloïse” (1991), “Rousseau et

ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University 302 Reviews l’interprétation des rêves” (1996), and “Manuscrit calciné, manuscrit occulté: d’un mariage scandaleux imaginé par deux ‘frères ennemis’” (2000). In “Julie ou la nouvelle Eurydice,” Viglieno posits the death of the mother as the underlying subject of La Nouvelle Héloïse, and suggests that writing the novel allowed Rousseau, who lost his mother in infancy, to go through a sort of grief process: “En prêtant à la disparue le visage rayonnant de Julie il a rempli par l’écriture ce vide laissé en lui” (150). The essay is also notable for its analysis of Julie and Claire’s relationship, which, although perhaps the most important relationship of the novel, has rarely been satisfactorily examined by literary critics. The judiciously placed “Rousseau et l’interprétation des rêves” segues seamlessly into a discussion of the ways the epistolary form allows Rousseau to exploit the topos of the premonitory dream and its literary interpretation by the characters. The essay convincingly questions the connection between the dream and Julie’s death, instead underscoring themes of repressed sexuality and paternity, in a reading that is complemented by a thorough understanding of the way dreams were viewed in the eighteenth century in general and in Rousseau’s writing in particular. Rousseau’s ambivalent attitude toward sexuality and paternity is touched on in a number of other essays, often through comparative readings with Corneille, Diderot, Richardson, and others. While there is merit in comparing authors, the length of time devoted to non- Rousseauian texts in several of the essays is distracting and does not necessarily yield a better understanding of Rousseau. “Richardson and Rousseau devant la loi du Père: tentative de psychocritique comparée” (1974) is a side-by-side reading of two novels whose similarities have been noted from the time of their publication, the Héloïse and Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–48). The heroes’ search for a father figure is an interesting point of comparison, although the reading is clearly biased toward Rousseau, such as when the essay argues that the violence inflicted on Clarissa by Lovelace reveals the “composante sadique” of Richardson’s personality (122). The claim that this is “une forme d’agressivité que Rousseau refuse” is hard to agree with, given that Julie is so brutally beaten by her father that she loses the child she is carrying (122). More importantly, psychoanalytic criticism is perhaps insufficient to an analysis of the father figures of Rousseau’s novel, which are challenging to consider separately from its socioeconomic and political dimensions. “Amour profane, amour sacré: résonances cornéliennes dans La Nouvelle Héloïse” (2002) uses the juxtaposition method of analysis borrowed from Mauron to examine the novel side- by-side with Rousseau’s unfinished play La mort de Lucrèce (1754) and Corneille’s Polyeucte (1641). According to the definition given in this meandering essay, “la superposition des textes fait apparaître des analogies structurelles, des relations insoupçonnées entre les

ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University Critiques 303 personnages” (177n40), yet the method appears more successful when applied to the same author, since the outstanding comparison of Julie and Lucrèce could have been developed into its own essay. Similarly, the juxtaposition of Rousseau’s early attempts at theatre in the volume’s concluding essay, “Les Structures dramatiques obsédantes dans le théâtre de Rousseau: essai de lecture psychocritique” (2014) is an effective reading of several critically neglected works that suggests a trajectory of his maturation as a writer. This welcome addition to Rousseau studies weaves together a satisfying investigation of the writer’s work and life without indulging in psycho biography; Viglieno’s encyclopedic knowledge of Rousseau’s oeuvre shines in a rigorous blending of the literary and analytical perspectives.

Ekaterina R. Alexandrova is Associate Professor of eighteenth-century French literature and culture at the University of Wyoming. She is currently working on a manuscript titled “Une idée fatale: The Representation of Suicide in the Eighteenth-Century French Novel.”

The Printed Reader: Gender, Quixotism, and Textual Bodies in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Amelia Dale Bucknell University Press, 2019. 230pp. $34.95. ISBN 978-1-6844-8102-6. Review by Leah M. Thomas, Virginia State University The Printed Readeroffers a multifaceted and chronological argument about the quixote as an impressionable reader whose reading practice reflects the printing technologies from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries from “a printing press literally pressing an inked surface upon the print medium (paper, or sometimes cloth)” (4, emphasis in original) to “the commercial adoption of ‘stereotyping,’ or the casting of printing plates from plaster of paris molds” (125). These printing methods pro vided metaphors for reading, that is, how reading imprinted the mind as demonstrated through the trope of the quixote. Amelia Dale includes images that reinforce this argument by illustrating the relationship be tween printing and the human body, such as an image identifying printing-press parts as comparable to body parts or clothing: “The Feet, Cheeks, Cap, ... Head, ... Hose, Garter, ... Eye of the Spindle, ... Toe of the Spindle” (5, figure 1). Moreover, as Charlotte Lennox writes, “Satire, like a magnifying Glass, may aggravate every Defect, in order to make its Deformity appear more hideous” (The Female Quixote, ed. Margaret Dalziel [1752; Oxford University Press, 1989], 277)—the Quixote thus operates “like a magnifying Glass” to accentuate print as a kind of lens through which the reader sees. Dale argues that this impression exceeds the mind, as it is both inscribed on the female body, as in The Female

Quixote (chapter 1), Polly Honeycombe (chapter 2), and Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (chapter 5), and gendered as feminine through the emasculation of the male body, as in Tristram Shandy (chapter 3) and The Spiritual Quixote (chapter 4). Dale begins her analysis of the quixotic reader with Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752), positing that “All Anglophone eighteenth-century quixotic narratives after Lennox can be read as being, to a greater or lesser extent, in conversation with her work” (19). She theorizes Arabella’s ways of looking through contemporaneous philosophers Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and David Hume in addition to the more recent work of Richard Rorty. Arabella’s reading the world she is in through the novels she has read is a kind of looking “toward the page and toward the world she lives in, but also toward mirrors, examining and eyeing the desirability of her own body, viewing, reading, and rereading herself” (19–20). Through this viewing, Arabella’s body is a text to be read through her blushes—her “body as seen, as read, and as registered” (41). Chapter 2 turns to Polly Honeycombe (1760) to demonstrate the close relationship between theatre and novels as staged performance. To substantiate the relationship between acting and reading, Dale applies Aaron Hill’s concept of the mind and body as “plastic,” a concept which also “evokes print technology” (56). This reading resonates with Earla Wilputte’s in Passion and Language in Eighteenth- Century Literature: The Aesthetic Sublime in the Work of Eliza Haywood, Aaron Hill, and Martha Fowke (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), which argues that Haywood, Hill, and Fowke incorporated the human body in their writing as a way to imprint the body onto the text, so that the text was both bodily expression and performance. Plastic and mechanical reading also forms the basis of satires of modern reading practices, as shown in chapter 5 of The Printed Reader. Bridgetina in Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800), which satirizes the French Revolution and Jacobinism, quotes text as readily as “set text” was duplicated (125), implying that she regurgitates rather than digests what she has read. Her thoughtless plenitude of speech extends to her body, suggesting promiscuous sexuality (127–28). The political instability of the ideas she mechanically reproduces corresponds to an unstable embodiment that is disruptive in its promiscuity, a correspondence that underscores “a naturalization of the ‘spirit’ of the text as opposed to a (false) ethics of recitation and repetition that Bridgetina espouses and embodies” (137). Thus, the printing technique of “set text,” or “stereotyping,” reflects ideas articulated as “cliché” (125). Dale addresses the impression of reading on both male and female char acters as penetrable and porous bodies. In Tristram Shandy (1759–67) (chapter 3) and The Spiritual Quixote (1773) (chapter 4), the male body is also revealed as vulnerable to being imprinted. Tristram Shandy attempts to reproduce in the text, but this attempt is thwarted though pleasurable: “The Shandean body is castrated, impotent, but also pleasurably textual”

(70). Accordingly, Dale writes, “Tristram’s attempt to reproduce through his writing is only one of the many ways that he and the male members of his Shandy family attempt to compensate for a wounded masculinity by trying to metaphorically father through language” (69). Similarly, because of the text’s agency to penetrate, sexuality gets imprinted through Methodist discourse in The Spiritual Quixote to emasculate male readers: “He [Wildgoose] inflates and eroticizes an established Christian trope, layering a series of conceptually confusing, but undeniably corporeal, images. Wildgoose draws on several biblical passages describing spiritual breast-feeding, a maternal God, and a feminized Christ” (104). The quixotic reader satirizes the feminization of reading by applying it to the male body. Dale’s gendered analysis of the quixotic reader connects a shift in sensibility with changes in print production over the course of the eighteenth century, as she reiterates in her conclusion. Dale draws on a range of eighteenth-century contexts—philosophy, play acting, sensibility, spirituality (Methodism), and politics (Jacobinism)—to demonstrate convincingly that the quixotic reader was indeed a satirical trope.

Leah M. Thomas is an Assistant Professor of English at Virginia State University. Her recent articles include “Knowledge Networks: Contested Geographies in The History of Mary Prince,” in ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830, and “Materializing the Immaterial: Creating Capital in a Mirrored Mirage,” in an edited collection.

Rotten Bodies: Class and Contagion in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Kevin Siena Yale University Press, 2019. 352pp. $40. ISBN 978-0300233520. Review by Lyn Bennett, Dalhousie University Rotten Bodies examines the lingering effects of plague epidemics in eighteenth-century discourses of illness. After appearing regularly since the Middle Ages, the last British plague epidemic of 1665–66 effectively wiped out twenty-five per cent of London’s population. Britons did not know that it would be the last plague occurrence, however, and the book invokes a wealth of evidence to show how fear of another visitation exerted its influence throughout the eighteenth century. The Marseille epidemic of 1720 exacerbated English anxieties, and the resulting plague panic brought about new quarantine regulations as well as numerous works that, Siena points out, consistently looked “to past epidemics for useful knowledge” (19). As the Marseille crisis subsided, England’s plague- induced fear did not, and Siena shows how earlier epidemics continued to shape discourses of disease even as writers increasingly shifted their focus to the pestilential fevers that became plague’s successor. Regarded as “just

ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University 306 Reviews a symptom” in the twentieth century, fever took on “a dizzying variety of forms” (15) as an illness unto itself in the eighteenth century. Fever, Siena argues, became “the most amorphous, mercurial, and complicated” of afflictions, in part because its perceived causes were rooted in beliefs about its less protean but much-dreaded antecedent. Examining eighteenth- century discourses of fever, this monograph focuses particularly on the relationship of disease and social class as it highlights the many ways plague “remained a powerful ghost animating discussions of poverty and disease throughout the Enlightenment and beyond” (228). Arguing that “by the time of the last great English plague epidemic of 1665–1666, medical constructions of the impoverished body demon strate all of the features that commentators would recycle, reformat, and redeploy” (19) throughout the century that followed, Siena traces a “remarkable consistency in theories on urban epidemics over a very long time” (221). The book opens with an illuminating chapter on seventeenth- century plague treatises that acknowledges the work of historians who have established a clear link between plague and poverty. That link, Siena argues, became essentialized in the plebeian body as physicians invoked Galenic theories to explain plague as the product of blockages that impeded the flow necessary to humoral balance and thereby encouraged rot and putrefaction. Drawing on the work of well-known seventeenth-century physicians such as Stephen Bradwell, Gideon Harvey, and Nathaniel Hodges, Siena’s analysis points to the emergence of an economic rhetoric associated not only with plague but also with scurvy, menstruation, and sexual licentiousness, a rhetoric that effectively conflated “poor blood and plague-infested blood” in a symbiotic equation that was ultimately “a matter of degree, not kind” (48). The discourses of plague and fever worked to fashion an economically informed physiology that rendered the already corrupt plebeian body so hospitable to plague that the disease could appear even without external cause. The book carefully grounds its over-arching argument in seventeenth-century beliefs about plague and poverty, and does so with the aim of illuminating plague’s foundational role in shaping discourses of affliction whose relationship to class became no less firmly entrenched as the eighteenth century unfolded. Tracing the ways that plague continued to serve the fashioning of a “class-specific physiology” (19) even as “pestilential fever took the baton from plague and became the principal disease on which anxieties about impoverished bodies were hung” (228), the book offers a detailed and compelling argument. In making his case, Siena invokes a wide-ranging body of evidence that is sometimes familiar and sometimes shocking. One example is found in the work of Daniel Defoe, where anxieties that remain largely implicit in his better-known A Journal of the Plague Year, a fictional account of the 1665–66 London plague, emerge as matter-of-

ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University Critiques 307 fact assertion in the slightly earlier Due Preparations for the Plague, where eight of Defoe’s thirteen proposals serve the end of “emptying London of its poor” (65). What is surprising about the views expressed in the work of Defoe and others is the suggestion that the poor actually “posed a greater risk before an epidemic hit than a respectable citizen exiting a city in which the plague raged,” as Londoners of means had been historically inclined to do. Defoe’s treatise is important, Siena points out, as “one of the clearest iterations of the pathogenic plebeian body in the early eighteenth century” that endured as writers returned “again and again to the literature from London’s last epidemic” (69). It is perhaps unsurprising that discourses of disease rooted in the physiological corruption of the “poorer sort” extended also to a burgeon ing prison system housing more debtors than serious offenders. Debtors represented people of various means, and those headed for prison were especially fearful of the poverty and squalor in a place where “the propertied knew that their bodies could degenerate into the rotten bodies of the very poor” (93). Those rotten bodies were thought especially susceptible to the ravages of “jail fever” or “jail distemper,” an emerging illness that would later become known as typhus. What is most noteworthy here is the finding that the imprisoned and “putrid plebeian body” (180) itself became as contagious as the disease welcomed by its corrupt physiology. Late eighteenth-century prison reform, Siena explains, responded to the “use of jail fever as a rhetorical weapon” (142) by aiming to prevent the contagion that was endemic to London’s many jails and prisons. Yet in the century’s latter years, even the well-known reformer John Howard could not shake off London’s plaguy inheritance. Howard may have campaigned against jail fever as he advocated for prison reform, but Siena’s analysis complicates beliefs about the man and his work in arguing that he “also set his crusade against that older, deeper and ever more frightening monster” that was plague (155). This book aims not to revise but to enhance and sometimes com plicate understandings of Enlightenment discourses of pestilence, plague, and the poor. Rather than challenging extant readings, Siena succeeds in showing how beliefs about poverty and illness were so firmly rooted in the past that “the moral biology of the poor that had been embedded in plague discourses long ago” led to little that was “all that novel” in the century or so that followed the infamous plague of 1665–66 (117). Reading the eighteenth century through the lens of what would be London’s last plague, Rotten Bodies transcends periodization as it enhances extant narratives of pestilential fevers by grounding them in discourses that invariably link plague with poverty. Siena’s study adds to our understanding of enduring ideas about class and contagion. Though

ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University 308 Reviews touching only briefly on how those ideas intersected with beliefs about race and gender, the book invites others to do so and makes its focus clear throughout. A well-researched and eminently readable book, Rotten Bodies considers a wide variety of texts and treatises in showing how earlier beliefs about plague continued to shape eighteenth-century discourses of affliction, and both its evidence and argument should prove useful to anyone interested in discourses of class and contagion in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain. Lyn Bennett is an Associate Professor of English at Dalhousie University and most recently the author of Rhetoric, Medicine, and the Woman Writer, 1600–1700 (2018). Her current research centres on Early Modern Maritime Recipes, an open- access database funded by SSHRC, which includes medical remedies.

Elisa von der Recke. Aufklärerische Kontexte und lebensweltliche Perspektiven, ed. Vera Viehöver, Valérie Leyh, and Adelheid Müller Universitätsverlag Winter, 2018. 391pp. €54. ISBN 978-3825369040. Review by Nicole Pohl, Oxford Brookes University Enlightenment cosmopolitanism was a defining discourse of the eighteenth century—a global event, comprehensible only in a global context connected through “contact zones” (Mary Louise Pratt), “zones of exchange,” and cultural transfer (Greenblatt, Espagne) in a process of complex mutual exchanges and influence. The lens of cultural transfer questions the usefulness of the concepts of “nation” and “country,” par ticularly in a period when nationalism and the nation state as a political entity had only slowly been emerging. It is also useful in geopolitical regions where borders of dukedoms, kingdoms, and states had been in constant flux, and where different cultures and ethnic groups had intermingled. This is particularly valid for the Baltic territories in the eighteenth century and the small Dukedom of Courland, home to the writer, diarist, and salonnière Elisa von der Recke. The history of the Enlightenment in the Baltic regions has only recently become a focus of scholarly interest. In this context, scholars have identified von der Recke’s important contribution to Baltic German literature and her political engagement for the survival of Courland, and the liberation of the serfs. Elisa Charlotte von der Recke, the focus of this fascinating collection of essays, was born in 1754 in the Duchy of Courland. She spent some of her childhood with her grandmother, Starostin Constanze von Korff, in Mitau, the capital of Courland, a centre of polite society. Through her stepsister, Anna Charlotte Dorothea von Kurland, wife of Peter Biron, the Duke of Courland, von der Recke was also well con nected to European aristocratic circles, and was indeed, as Anna Gajdis

ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University Critiques 309 explores in her essay in this volume, an important negotiator in Poland and Russia for the future fate of Courland. In another essay, Doris Schumacher uses the portraits of von der Recke as evidence that she tried to downplay her aristocratic background by fashioning herself as a classical, enlightened, and educated woman. The political position and government of the small Dukedom of Courland, now in Latvia, had been chaotic since the collapse of the German Order State in 1560. The Treaty of Wilna in 1561 created the Dukedom Courland as a Polish fief, with Gotthard von Ketteler as the first Duke of Courland in 1562. When the last member of the Ketteler family passed away, Ernst Johann Biron (1690–1772) was elected Duke in 1737. After a difficult reign, he abdicated in 1769 in favour of his son, Peter Biron. With the gradual annexation of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century by Russia, Prussia, and Austria, Courland’s independence was compromised. Finally, on 16 March 1797, Russia seized control of Courland, and the dukedom ceased to exist. Though the region was ethnically diverse, the Baltic German nobility dominated, both culturally and socially. In 1771, Elisa married Kammerherr Georg Peter Magnus von der Recke (1739–95), but they separated in 1776, and divorced in 1781. Her diaries, travel accounts, poetry, and epistolary exchanges with Europe’s most illustrious characters, such as Catherine the Great, Alexander I, King Stanislaus August, Rahel Varnhagen, Moses Mendelssohn, David Friedländer, Giacomo Casanova, and Friedrich Nicolai, reveal the cosmopolitical outlook and socio-cultural interconnectedness of von der Recke. The essays by Dorothee von Hellermann, Helmut Watzlawick, and the whole of section 5, “Networks and Sociability,” document these intricate networks. The fifteen essays collected in Elisa von der Recke. Aufklärerische Kontexte und lebensweltliche Perspektiven continue these explorations but widen the scope to a transdisciplinary and transnational enquiry. As the editors highlight in their introduction, the essays are dedicated to a range of disciplines, including Jewish Studies, History, Theology, Art History, Music, Gender Studies, and Cultural Studies, to underscore that von der Recke moved around a Europe that was culturally heterogeneous as well as socially and politically entangled through dynamic, dynastic networks and cultural transfer. This important and valuable collection is the result of a conference on von der Recke in 2016 at the Université Liège. Unlike many confer ence essay collections, the five sections offer a logical and chronological structure to the volume that cross-reference cogently. The scholarly work that went into the different contributions is exceptional, referring to manuscript and primary works, paintings, and music scores, and I can only cite a few in my review.

The first section highlights von der Recke’s self-fashioning as an (autobiographical) writer and a woman. Maris Saagpakk compares the autobiographical accounts of von der Recke and the Estonian noblewoman Christine Amalie Jencken and explores the different social and economic confines in which these women found themselves in terms of marriage and divorce. The genre of autobiography aided both women’s efforts to justify and make sense of their lives, which did not conform to eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century gender norms. The trauma of their tumultuous lives resulted in physical ailments and illnesses, a topic Vera Vierhöfer pursues in her chapter. It was particularly Christoph August Tiedge, von der Recke’s (and Dorothea von Kurland’s) biographer, but also her life partner, who peddled the gendered stereotype of the artistic yet physically fragile woman. Vierhöfer argues that von der Recke used her illnesses instead as artistic stimuli for her composition of religious hymns and her epistolary autobiography, but also as justification to travel. Adelheid Müller, in the fourth section of the collection, picks up on von der Recke’s many travels as Peregrinatio academica within a carefully chosen transnational network of scholars and writers to study and improve herself. Physical ailments thus did not prevent von der Recke from living and travelling; on the contrary, she demonstrated immense curiosity and zest for life, even in illness. Both Gaby Pailer and Irmgart Scheitler discuss von der Recke’s musical writing. Scheitler explores Johann Adam Hiller’s setting to music of von der Recke’s religious songs, which in content and form follow in some ways Christian Fürchtegott Gellert’s Geistliche Oden und Lieder (1758), but also Georg Joachim Zollikofer’s hymn book. These echoes characterize von der Recke’s religious faith as moderate Enlightenment theology, focused on religious praxis and leading a moral life. Uta Lohmann underscores this thesis in her exploration of von der Recke’s correspondences with Mendelssohn and Friedländer. Continuing the analysis of von der Recke’s musical work, Pailer directs her attention to von der Recke’s Her “Ball- Lied” (the dance-song) which, as Pailer argues, stages contemporary gender expectations and creates a tension between traditional and new gender concepts. It was not only the prominent Hiller who composed the music to von der Recke, but, as Kornél Magvas shows, it was also the Kapellmeister Johann Gottlieb Naumann who set music to von der Recke’s poetry and songs. Of interest to the readers of Eighteenth-Century Fiction is Kairit Kaur’s exploration of Baltic prose writing by women, starting with Valérie, ou lettres de Gustave de Linar by the illustrious Mme de Krüdener. Elisa von der Recke published short stories in a variety of periodicals across Europe, which created, as Müller shows in her chapter, a useful and large network of contacts for the travelling von der Recke. Her best friend,

Sophie Becker, not only travelled with her but also published a travel diary of those journeys in 1791. Her own prose writing, particularly the fragments Sophie an Emilie and Elise an Emilie are epistolary novellas echoing Sophie von La Roche’s Die Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim (1771), one of the first German novels of sensibility. Sophie Becker also references Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748) in her correspondence, though, as Kaur argues, she alters the “model Clarissa” significantly. Nevertheless, the different readings of von der Recke’s literary and musical work presented in this volume are underpinned by an understanding of transcultural intertextuality and cross-fertilization. This essay collection is an important contribution to Baltic Studies, Gender Studies, and the study of women’s writing in the eighteenth century. Elisa von der Recke epitomizes Enlightenment cosmopolitanism by her seemingly effortless moving between East and West Europe, between courts and the coteries and networks of the respublica literaria as a writer, poet, diplomat, and correspondent.

Nicole Pohl has published and edited books on women’s utopian writing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European salons and epistolarity, and the Bluestockings. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the Elizabeth Montagu Correspondence Online project (EMCO), http://emco.swansea.ac.uk.

The Language of Fruit: Literature and Horticulture in the Long Eighteenth Century by Liz Bellamy University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. 256pp. $69.95. ISBN 978-0812250831. Review by Anna K. Sagal, Cornell College The Language of Fruit caught my attention right from the title, and this book has remained with me in profound ways since I finished reading it. Liz Bellamy incorporates an ambitious array of horticultural texts, agricultural treatises, poems, plays, and novels into a nuanced discussion of the significance of fruit throughout English literary history. The title claims the monograph is limited to the long eighteenth century, but with chapters that centralize Greco-Roman mythology, biblical tra dition, medieval poetry, and early modern horticultural texts, the title is somewhat misleading. Throughout, Bellamy demonstrates her facility with close reading and analysis across genres, producing a volume that is enjoyable and insightful in equal measure. Bellamy begins with a goal that appeals to any scholar of ecocriticism or critical plant studies: “to discourse with fruit trees, understand their language, and recognize how they communicate with our inward sense” (1). What unfolds in the following chapters manages to deftly “discourse” with the history of fruit representation throughout literature while re

ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University 312 Reviews taining this original sense of wonder. In lively prose, Bellamy escorts her readers through the complex and often contradictory legacy of fruit in literature. Encompassing everything from class and socio-economic status to gender and sexuality, fruit can be deployed to represent any number of critical anxieties, political interests, or economic designs. Bellamy’s interdisciplinary project reminds us that, “as a natural product of human intervention that is freighted with symbolic associations, fruit subverts unproblematic binary oppositions of nature and art, agriculture and industry, and nature and culture that have been articulated in some ecocritical theory” (8). In many ways, The Language of Fruit challenges certain assumptions of ecocritical theory as it productively expands the limits of how we can look to nature and individual biota like apples, oranges, and pineapples to inform our understanding of literature and society in the past. Bellamy rightly notes that most research and criticism on plants in the eighteenth century and prior have centralized flowers, whereas her innovative investment in fruit showcases the unique ways in which these particular plants—as intrinsically consumable—makes more apparent the linkages between plants and sexuality. Given the popularity of fruit references in literature (the ubiquity of which I had never realized until reading Bellamy’s careful study), we have much to learn about both the socio-cultural significance of these plants and the extent to which their agricultural development influenced society over time. Chapter 1’s focus on fruit in biblical and classical tradition grounds the dazzling analysis of subsequent chapters. This section discusses the Tree of Knowledge, but also encompasses a broader selection of texts inspired by Genesis, as well as the Song of Solomon, and the Old and New Testaments more extensively. In fact, Bellamy touches on everything from Egyptian wall painting to the Eclogues of Virgil to provide a thorough survey of the complex ways in which fruit came to signify a seemingly contradictory range of ideas and concepts that allowed various biota to be used representation ally for multiple critical purposes in English literature. The second chapter combines these classical and biblical fruit associ ations with horticultural manuals to highlight the ongoing influence of cultural tropes on agricultural descriptions. Referring to early modern sources including Gervase Markham’s The English Husbandman (1613) and William Lawson’s A New Orchard and Garden (1618), Bellamy guides readers through a survey of horticultural texts both recognizable and relatively obscure to a non-specialist. Her analysis is especially successful with reference to the ambiguous overlaps between orchards and gardens in the early modern period, and how such seemingly similar horticultural spaces often conveyed distinct cultural and literary associations. The third chapter brings a fresh perspective to the diversity of approaches to understanding the role of nature in seventeenth-century pastoral poetry. Beginning with a meticulous reading of Ben Jonson’s

Penshurst (1616), Bellamy proceeds to pull ideas from garden history, ecocritical readings, and political accounts of enclosure and colonialism to assess a broader selection of seventeenth-century poems. I particularly appreciate how Bellamy’s reading of John Milton’s Paradise Lost chooses to “focus primarily on the unforbidden fruits,” lending new interest to a much-discussed text while providing clear evidence of how horticultural literature made this poem accessible to a wide range of contemporary readers in specific ways (93). A chapter that will be of much interest to Restoration scholars (I found it immediately helpful for the Restoration literature course I was teaching while first reading this book), chapter 4 focuses on the transi tion in English literature from the idyllic hardy apples of the English orchard in poetry to the seductive imported orange in Restoration theatre. Bellamy’s expansive knowledge of drama in the period allows her to provide a survey of significant fruit from Wycherley, Etherege, Dryden, Behn, Shadwell, Centlivre, Congreve, and others. In each case, Bellamy shows how fruit signified the danger of female sexuality, whether that was the inexperienced “green” fruit of young girls or the overripe fruit of widows and old maids. Chapter 5, featuring georgic poetry, focuses on a comparatively nar rower selection of texts, but Bellamy’s analysis of John Philips’s Cyder (1708), John Gay’s Wine (1708), and a few other brief texts is equally illuminating. The contrast between domestic fruits and imported fruits fails to retain consistent boundaries, reflecting shifts in commercialism, agricultural production, and international trade as well as gender and class dynamics. Bellamy’s incorporation of gardening handbooks into her analysis highlights once again her argumentative poise and skill. In the final chapter, drawing on traditional linkages between the history of the novel and the emergence of consumerism, Bellamy points to the “increasing availability of domestically produced hothouse fruit” in the Romantic period that enabled fruit like the pineapple to be put to new literary and critical uses (161). Expensive imported fruits represented everything from “corruption and extravagance” to “technological in genuity” (169–70). Evoking, for example, the jeweled animatronic pineapple in Evelina (1778) alongside the cultivation of hothouse fruits by several unsavoury aristocrats in novels like Charlotte Smith’s Desmond (1792) and Mary Robinson’s Angelina (1796), Bellamy is able to chart the associations of these fruits with a broad range of “unnatural” things, from slavery to exploitative new wealth to certain political stances. The Language of Fruitis also successful in the little details. The incor poration of several black and white illustrations reaffirms the importance of the book’s interdisciplinary argument: the images nuance the analyses and reveal the extent to which fruit was used across media to support varied critical messages. Bellamy includes detailed information on horti

ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University 314 Reviews cultural practices in each chapter, such as how a given plant was cultivated, propagated, and harvested. The expertise she reflects not only in literary analysis but also in the history of horticulture from the medieval period to the Romantic period and beyond makes this book shine. A valuable and brilliant contribution to the study of literature in England, The Language of Fruit has forever changed the way I will read texts of the eighteenth century.

Anna K. Sagal’s current research focuses on eighteenth-century scientific litera ture and critical plant studies. Her book, Botanical Entanglements: Women, Plants, Literature, and Artwork in the Eighteenth Century, is forthcoming from the University of Virginia Press in Fall 2021.

Minerva’s Gothics: The Politics and Poetics of Romantic Exchange, 1780–1820 by Elizabeth A. Neiman University of Wales Press, 2019. 304pp. £70. ISBN 978-1786833679. Review by Laura R. Kremmel, South Dakota School of Mines & Technology The gothic has long been considered a lower-class, “trash” mode of popular reading, particularly for its cheap shocks and reliance on recycled conventions. Elizabeth A. Neiman adds her worthy volume to growing scholarship that is working to dispel such notions and to revalue a highly influential literary form. In the preface, she lays out her aim to perform a focused study of the Minerva novels and their impact on the market, its readers and writers, and reading practices through an analysis of active exchange and linkages between early Romanticism and later poets. Far from a passive act, Neiman describes participation in the Minerva Gothic as collaboration among the author, the text, and the reader. Literary conventions of the popular novel, long criticized as unoriginal and lazy, become tools of power and communication in this network of inclusive, collaborative exchange. As she writes, “reading Minerva novels as exchangeable (but not interchangeable) nodes in a network illustrates that many period novelists do not see any necessary contradiction between imagination and freedom or imitation and constraint,” an approach that liberates traditions like the gothic—discussed in her later chapters—from judgments based on such contradictions (xviii). Furthermore, “Minerva’s derivative themes are an accidental inheritance that furnishes writers with the language to respond to Romantic-era debates, most notably by refashioning Romantic redefinitions of authorship and literature into a collective authorial model,” a clear articulation of the book’s contribution to a range of ongoing debates and areas of study (xxi). The book’s complex chapter sequence traces the development of Minerva publications chrono

ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University Critiques 315 logically, but also by author-readers, events, and debates. Its three sections focus on (1) the debates and texts surrounding feminist discourse and the role of romance and fantasy, (2) the impact of the French Revolution and sensibility, and (3) authorship and the gothic. Neiman fulfils her goal of tracing the Minerva press’s influence and resuscitating often dismissed and discredited conventions in several ways. The first chapter takes a truly unique approach within literary studies through a painstaking statistical exploration of the books published in the press, the authors who published both there and elsewhere, and even the advertising and quality of paper on which these books were printed. Though such an approach may feel outside the conventional critical methodology of literary scholars, Neiman makes the data clear, relevant, and interesting, providing visual charts and graphs to illustrate the written text. Based on numerical data that leans toward a social science approach as well as literary interpretation of that data, her argument is truly interdisciplinary. Through these lists and headcounts, Neiman lays out a statistical background for the rest of her book, including how she defines a Minerva author, the role of gender in the press’s effects, the system of anonymity among authors, and the press’s rise and fall. This chapter gets at the multidimensionality of history and culture, telling the story of Minerva press’s waxing and waning with multiple layers of micro and macro perspectives. Such an approach risks alienating literary scholars, but in this case it instead models a successful expansion of critical engagement through these methods as complex, accessible, and productive. Subsequent chapters build on this context of the rise and fall of Minerva publications, filling in the gaps of historical events and authorial pursuits, such as part 1’s exploration of romance tropes, women writers, and Mary Wollstonecraft’s contentious relationship with popular reading. Though critical of the literary conventions that give women unrealistic, even dangerous, expectations for romance and social standing, Wollstonecraft also wrests control of those same conventions to show how they might be used with restraint and care. Rather than simply repeating the oft-discussed literary tropes that contribute to ideas of female romance and sensibility, Nieman looks at them as devices in themselves: tools that can be recognized and that leave a trace. She provides a refreshing new look that rescues such conventions from oversimplification and dismissal. While candidly describing the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century judgments and criticisms of Minerva press books—cheap, formulaic, insignificant— Neiman artfully exposes how even such negative consideration of this literary player provides copious cultural indicators.

Section 2’s shift from the sentimental novel to the providential novel identifies influences from the pamphlet wars—particularly the work of Edmund Burke—on the novel market. Often treated separately, these two types of writing become clearly linked through Neiman’s thorough dissection of Burke’s hierarchical concerns next to William Godwin’s philosophies and the Minerva novels that created them. She shows how “Minerva’s shared circuit of popular conventions enables novelists to contribute actively to pressing debates” across a “shared social text,” allowing them to engage both revolutionary and counter-revolutionary texts (101–2). Nieman spends one chapter in this section digging deep into Godwin’s connections with the Minerva press novels, his philosophy and politics, and his incorporation of both in Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794). Even after the market success of Minerva novels had begun to wane, Nieman convincingly argues for their continued influence in the final section, as the press’s earlier successes “primed its novelists to treat popular conventions as attached to the desires and values that reproduce themselves through a genre and its authors” (173). This section is the most substantial engagement with the gothic as a mode or tradition, which is surprising given the title of the book. Neiman’s choice to focus on the work of Percy Bysshe Shelley is also interesting considering the other authors that she does not include or discusses only briefly—Mary Shelley does not even appear in the index, and other prominent gothic writers merit only a few pages. Nonetheless, the section’s acknowledgement of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s debt to the gothic tradition and Minerva writers in his lesser-known Zastrozzi (1810) fills some of these gaps and clearly reinforces the book’s claims. Nieman makes a unique, thoughtful, and convincing argument for renewed study of the Minerva novels, their writers, and their impact on socio-political structures of thought in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is rare that an academic book is both informative and entertaining, but Neiman’s tone throughout her monograph strikes that balance with the extensive information on reading culture, book history, literary analysis, and socio-political explanation. She not only contributes valuable scholarship to the movement to elevate “lower” forms of literature, but she also provides a model for how literary studies can utilize and articulate data-driven research. Laura R. Kremmel is an Assistant Professor of English and Humanities at South Dakota School of Mines & Technology, specializing in Gothic Studies, British Romanticism, and Medical Humanities and Histories. She is currently working on a book manuscript that combines these topics.

Material Enlightenment: Women Writers and the Science of the Mind, 1770–1830 by Joanna Wharton Boydell Press, 2018. 288pp. $99. ISBN 978-1783272952. Review by Rita J. Dashwood, University of Warwick

Anna Letitia Barbauld’s reading primer Lessons for Children, first published in 1778, introduces the child to each month by forming an association between the said month and a particular sensory experience pertaining to that time of year. February, for example, is associated with the pleasant visual of the “Pretty white snow-drop, with a green stalk” (quoted on 44). Featuring a maternal figure who leads her child through his learning experiences by encouraging him to engage with the objects around him—such as by smelling the hay and tumbling in it—Barbauld’s work produces patterns of association, thus marking a departure from previous reading primers. Barbauld was deeply knowledgeable on philosophy of mind, exploring her topic through the writing of her educational books. Joanna Wharton’s new monograph brings to light such instances as this section from Lessons to convey the ways in which women writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were pivotal to the pre-disciplinary development of psychological theory and practice. By uncovering aspects of these writers’ lives that help illuminate their works, Wharton offers a comprehensive picture of the impact women had in this field. This book covers five authors: Barbauld, Honora Edgeworth, Hannah More, Elizabeth Hamilton, and Maria Edgeworth. All these women, as Wharton states, participated in debates concerning human conscious ness and its relation to the material world, despite the challenge that this posed because of their gender: in the period in which they were writing, women were barred from universities, most radical dissenting academies, anatomy classes, and any access to the medical profession. Yet these women contributed with important works to the field of psychology. For the most part, these works have remained neglected. As Wharton explains with regard to Barbauld, previous work on this writer established a distinction between her children’s literature and the rest of her works, thus missing many of the intertextual links among them and depoliticizing her writing, which Wharton describes as “an intrinsically political act” (54). As Wharton affirms, it is important to emphasize that Barbauld’s writing and practice are demonstrative of her “belief in education as a means of bringing about political reform” (68). By offering a reconsideration of the educational writings of Barbauld and other authors, Wharton demonstrates the various contributions these women made to the political dialogue on education in this period and the field of psychology more broadly, despite the various gendered obstacles in their way.

Writing a book on a set of authors united by their gender and, con sequently, the distinctly gendered challenges they faced poses a pertinent question that Wharton addresses: Why group such women together when they held disparate views? Such a decision, as Wharton admits, goes directly against Maria Edgeworth’s protestation to Barbauld that “there is no bond of union among literary women, any more than among literary men” (quoted on 20), when the latter suggested the creation of a periodical written entirely by women, an idea Edgeworth rejected. Wharton addresses such potential methodological concerns by explain ing that it is the disunity among the authors’ views, not their unity, that is of interest to her in this study. Wharton successfully accomplishes her aim of recovering a philosophical tradition to which women contributed with influential but often neglected work. There is a story-telling quality to this text, as it expertly combines biographical research with textual analysis, to highlight aspects of these writers’ lives that were influential to their work. The interweaving of such contextualization with the textual analysis is an original aspect of this book, which provides new insights into these five authors’ works. By considering Honora Edgeworth’s practices and notebooks, for instance, Wharton frames the education and observation of her children as a scientific endeavour. Many of Honora Edgeworth’s plans never came into fruition, due to her unexpected death by tuberculosis at age twenty-eight. Her Practical Education; Or, The History of Harry and Lucy had been intended as the first volume of a series, to be published with her husband, Richard Edgeworth. The impact of Honora Edgeworth’s work has been severely underestimated, as Wharton indicates. Practical Education; Or, The History of Harry and Lucy contains an appeal to other parents to “pursue a similar plan” of studying children’s education, so that “we might, in time, hope to obtain a full history of the infant mind” (quoted on 89). As Wharton demonstrates, Honora Edgeworth’s work was intended to help an underdeveloped field of study become a whole movement: “Had the attempt to chart the growth of the child’s mind been replicated so as to become generic, Honora’s notes might have been considered formative in the emergence of developmental psychology as a distinct field of study” (89). It would take another fifty years, Wharton points out, for Charles Darwin to be lauded as the founding father of the discipline. Wharton’s insightful book offers an original contribution to the fields of eighteenth-century studies and women’s studies; its compelling analyses and engaging writing style together make it an absolute page-turner and a pleasure to read. By drawing on previous work on eighteenth-century women writers by such scholars as Harriet Guest, Wharton’s monograph contributes to a wider understanding of some of the radical, influential, and, at times, complicated aspects of these women’s works that have

ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University Critiques 319 previously not been granted the scholarly attention they deserve. This book also makes a valuable contribution to the field of material culture studies, by demonstrating how the texts authored by these women saw childhood reading as a physical act, and thereby established a connection between books and the physical world in innovative ways.

Rita J. Dashwood is an early career academic specializing in the relationships between women and property in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novel. She is currently working on her first book project, “Women and Property Ownership in Jane Austen.”

A Political Biography of Sarah Fielding by Christopher D. Johnson Routledge, 2017. xii+276pp. $145. ISBN 978-1848933859. Review by Linda Bree, PhD, editor and researcher Christopher D. Johnson is disarmingly honest about the formidable difficulties he faced in his task of adding a study of Sarah Fielding to the Routledge Eighteenth-Century Political Biographies series. He cites firstly “the paucity of available biographical information” about Fielding and then “the author’s apparent lack of interest in politics” (1); turning to her work, he acknowledges that, since she was a collaborative writer, it is often difficult to be sure which words are hers, and since she wrote primarily to alleviate financial distress (“Perhaps the best Excuse that can be made for a Woman’s venturing to write at all,” as she declared in the “Advertisement to the Reader” at the head of her first novel The Adventures of David Simple [1744]), the form and content of her writings might well have been compromised by commercial pressures. From such unpromising beginnings, Johnson goes on to offer a full and perceptive account of Sarah Fielding and her work. In the process, he even challenges critics who argue for political readings of one or another of Fielding’s narratives, such as the implications of her use of the word “commonwealth,” or that there is a relationship between The Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia and the beginnings of the Seven Years’ War. Johnson concludes that for Fielding the political becomes personal, or at least interpersonal, and he offers convincing arguments for the value of this understanding in her writings. Fielding’s work has always resisted easy definition. IfDavid Simple is clearly a novel (indeed, one of the most prominent fictions of its time), the same cannot be said of its successor, Familiar Letters between the Principal Characters in David Simple and Some Others (1747), a miscellany of moral essays, mostly presented in the form of epistolary exchanges. Fielding sub sequently penned, alongside more novels, a text for children, at least two pamphlets of literary criticism (one of which was only discovered

ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University 320 Reviews recently: it is tantalizing to think there may be more), a jointly authored “dramatic fable,” a fictionalized autobiography, and a translation from Greek. Johnson moves chronologically through her life and career, with necessary emphasis on the work, since information about the life remains sparse. He offers particularly valuable new insights intoFamiliar Letters, which, as he points out, has rarely been considered by scholars, and on The Cry (1754), about which, after reviewing the available evidence of a collaboration between Fielding and her friend Jane Collier, he concludes that Fielding had the “artistic vision” (186), with Collier taking a subordinate, perhaps largely editorial role. More controversial ly, he argues that Fielding’s claim to be the editor rather than the author of The History of Ophelia (1760)—having, as she declared, found the manuscript in “an old Buroe” (256)—probably reflects the truth rather than literary convention: his careful assessment of the internal evidence supporting this view, coming after chapters devoted to Fielding’s other works, is persuasive. Johnson finds a high level of consistency in terms of aims and themes across Fielding’s writings in all their different forms. He argues that Fielding is always concerned with how men and women can find happiness in this world—an aim entirely compatible with Christian belief, but in a framework of practical action rather than faith, and with strikingly little consideration of any life to come—and that she sees the prospect of such happiness as threatened, above all, by “passion,” which for her means the self-centred and self-deceiving errors of pride and vanity. She shows how right-thinking only comes about through honest self-examination and self-knowledge. And she appropriates other literary texts, demonstrating how narratives can legitimately be rewritten by people thinking and analyzing for themselves (a rather clever argument on Johnson’s part, countering claims, made during Fielding’s lifetime and since, that her growing habit of extensive literary quotation was a form of padding). The contradictions in Fielding’s philosophy also receive attention. Johnson points to the difficulties inherent in simultaneously accepting society’s hierarches and structures as Fielding does, including where gender is concerned, and encouraging people to think for, and value, themselves. Occasionally, this leads to incoherence: “The political content of Volume the Last is a muddle,” he admits (181). He quotes the words of Portia in The Cry, that “to marry sensibly let the woman chuse the man she can obey with pleasure” (205) as Fielding’s pragmatic solution to her difficulties, and concludes that her aim is to guide actions in a real, rather than an ideal, world, as she trains girls in particular to “make the best of what eighteenth-century British society offers them” (206). It is to some extent frustrating for Sarah Fielding scholars, but in evitable, that any biography has to pay extensive attention to her rela tionship with her brother Henry, who was so prominent in her life

ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University Critiques 321 and the early part of her literary career. Johnson vigorously takes up the sibling cudgels on Sarah’s behalf, arguing that the moral romance of David Simple is, in some respects, more sophisticated than Henry’s comic epic in prose in that it is a guide for living in the real world rather than a tale relying for its outcome on benevolent providence. Johnson finds Henry’s influence on, and attitude to, Sarah’s work almost entirely malign. In writing prefaces to her texts, Henry, “more than celebrating his sister’s work, ... wants to establish superiority over it” (70); he is “petulant, condescending” and “smug” (123, 146). But Johnson’s enthusiasm goes too far on one occasion. He condemns as “particularly telling” in the second edition of David Simple “Henry’s change of chapter title from ‘Wherein is to [be] seen the Infallibility of Men’s Judgments concerning the Virtues and [this should read “or”] Vices of their own Wives’ to ‘A Scene taken from very low Life, in which only such Examples are to be found’” (67). It is to some extent true that, as Johnson points out, Henry’s words refocus the chapter from gender to class issues, and from domestic to public concerns; his title does not replace Sarah’s, however: it is added to hers. There are a number of other small errors and typos in the text. The Earl of Shaftesbury’s names are given as “Anthony Ashely Copper” (103); Mary Leapor is “Mary Leoper” (141); Thomas Hayter’s surname is given as Hayter, Hayler, and Hayton in the same paragraph (165); the novel “Sir Grandison” is referred to (211). Sarah Fielding did not (alas) refer to Clarissa’s Lovelace as “Loveless” (211), and Ursula Fielding did not write about “that rouge Tom Jones” (109); French names and titles are occasionally unreliable; the moral term “Christine Fortitude” is written twice (126). Such slips, which could have been corrected by the press’s copy editors, are unfortunate because they distract from what is otherwise a valuable and thoughtful account, full of new insights about an eighteenth- century writer whose works, whether or not they can be described as political even in the widest sense, can only be better understood as a result of this close and informed scrutiny. Linda Bree was formerly Head of Humanities at Cambridge University Press. She is author of the Twayne English Authors study of Sarah Fielding (1996), and editor of Henry Fielding’s Amelia (2010). Her revised edition of Sarah Fielding’s The Adventures of David Simple will be published by Broadview Press.

Eliza Fenwick: Early Modern Feminist by Lissa Paul University of Delaware Press, 2019. 295pp. ISBN 978-1-64453-010-8. Review by Jessica Banner, University of Ottawa On 13 April 1834, Eliza Fenwick wrote a letter to her friend John Moffatt wherein she recounts the mysterious deaths of her two eldest grandsons, William and Thomas Rutherford, who drowned the day before in Lake Ontario. The dramatic circumstances of their deaths in conjunction with the eloquence with which this news is conveyed act as a framing device for Lissa Paul’s investigation. Using this particular letter with its inherent mystery and dramatic premise as her starting point, Paul piques the interest of readers and foregrounds the central role of letter writing in her argument for Eliza Fenwick’s historical relevance. Drawing on letters from the author as well as from her friends and family, Paul argues for this author’s literary importance by crafting an engaging biographical narrative that follows Fenwick’s transatlantic adventures in the late eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth century. Paul makes a compelling argument for including both an author’s pub lished works and unpublished correspondence in literary biographies. Paul’s text reads as part personal history and part historical adventure novel, where both biographer and subject feature as important char acters. The personal intimacy that Paul creates is fostered by using Fenwick’s first name throughout the text and by including anecdotes from Paul’s research process. By using the author’s first name and deliberately shifting into a “first-person strategic” (17) narrative voice to comment on archival materials, Paul creatively constructs a monograph that is firmly rooted in feminist discourse. To this end, Paul is primarily in dialogue with feminist scholars Janet Todd and Lynne Pearce. Paul utilizes both Todd’s suggestion that one of the strengths of feminist criticism is its use of the personal, as well as Pearce’s notion that the use of the strategic first-person in scholarly works signals important relationships within the text and between text and audience (17). Eliza Fenwick is an important contribution to feminist conversations and also to eighteenth-century, Caribbean, and Canadian studies. By using the first-person strategic, Paul creates an accessible text that incorporates literary commentary, historical events, her archival challenges, and Fenwick’s personal experiences to form a unique biography that can be enjoyed by non-expert readers and academic researchers alike. In chapter 1 of 7, “Daughter of Methodism,” Paul sets the stage for her investigation by discussing the lives of eighteenth-century itinerant preachers like Fenwick’s father, Peter Jaco (21). This chapter may be par ticularly useful for those unfamiliar with the period because it provides

ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University Critiques 323 a good deal of contextual information on eighteenth-century social history. Chapter 2, “Mother and Author,” continues to trace Eliza’s early years. Perhaps of most interest to eighteenth-century scholars is Paul’s discussion of literary culture in the late eighteenth century. Fenwick’s letters foreground an extensive discussion of the debates about “freedom of speech, reform, revolution and treason” (65). The discussion of her personal life and social circle (which included notable figures like William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft) is linked to larger literary and cultural shifts in the 1790s. In this chapter, Paul underscores the importance of letters to the construction and comprehension of Fenwick’s narrative. Paul establishes the framework for a larger argu ment that, in the absence of subsequent novels following the publication of her epistolary text Secresy (1795), the extensive collection of letters become her “epistolary autobiography” (63). Chapters 3 and 4 explore Fenwick’s final years in Britain. Paul meticu lously links the ways in which her work as a children’s book author and governess in England and Ireland facilitated both her independence from her husband and her later work as a teacher in Barbados and North America by building up her “educational credentials” and “business acumen” (101). Although the primary focus of these chapters is to demonstrate Fenwick’s significance in the history of children’s literature and showcase her talent as a governess, Paul devotes considerable space to discussing the challenges of compiling the biography. Employing the first-person strategic voice, Paul draws the reader’s attention to the often unseen work of the historian and biographer to construct a cohesive narrative out of information that may be ambiguous or difficult to access. Not only does Paul emphasize her own role in co- constructing Eliza (by filling in the archival gaps), but she also critiques past biographical works. Of particular interest to Paul is the depiction of Fenwick in A.F. Wedd’s The Fate of the Fenwicks(1927). Paul is critical of the way in which Wedd depicts Fenwick, and particularly Wedd’s characterization of her as “recklessly impulsive” (89). Although Paul acknowledges the contributions Wedd made to initiating a literary historiography for Fenwick, she underscores the problematic intrusion of Wedd’s own biases. Paul reinforces the collaborative relationship between biographer and subject, prompting readers to think critically and ask their own questions about the presentation and distortion of archival information. Chapters 5 and 6 chronicle Fenwick’s life in the Caribbean with her daughter Eliza Ann and her son Orlando. These chapters document Fenwick’s efforts to establish a school for girls in Barbados; they also devote considerable space to discussions of slavery and the colonial

ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University 324 Reviews practices of the period that Fenwick witnessed and participated in. Paul adeptly interweaves Fenwick’s documentation of running a school in Barbados with concepts like “renting” enslaved people (149) and events like Bussa’s Rebellion in 1816 (150). Certainly, Fenwick’s depiction of daily life occupies a large portion of these chapters, but the letters Paul has chosen to include form a critical commentary on the growing social tension between colonists and enslaved populations in the early nineteenth-century Caribbean. For example, when Fenwick writes about her frustration with relying on the labour of enslaved people who “wouldn’t behave like the servants she knew in Britain” (150), Paul does not let these remarks go unchallenged. Instead, evoking the first-person strategic voice, Paul provides necessary counterpoints to Fenwick by suggesting that these remarks represent a “willful blindness” (151) adopted as a survival strategy to navigate the tumultuous socio-political shifts of the period. In the last chapter, “North American Grandmother,” Paul returns to the story of Fenwick’s grandsons and their mysterious deaths. Delving into the details, which chronicle the boys failed apprenticeships, likely alcoholism, and generally erratic behaviour, Paul paints a picture of the challenges Fenwick faced as the sole provider for her family. As the biography comes to a close, Paul devotes a considerable amount of space to the ways in which the events of Fenwick’s life and her legacy have been curated by her decedents. Paul concludes with an anecdote about meeting with one of Fenwick’s descendants, John Cornell. This personal story draws together the modern with the historical, and highlights Paul’s phenomenal imple mentation of feminist theory as practice through her use of the first- person strategic voice. Paul strikes a delicate balance between literary biography and personal meditation on archival studies. Her meticulous collation of letters and historical research work together to elucidate the argument for Fenwick’s literary importance, as well as for continued experimentation within the genre of biographical literature. Jessica Banner is a PhD candidate at the University of Ottawa. Her research project analyzes the relationship between the emergence of women on the English stage and in the proto-industrial workroom through an examination of garments in eighteenth-century drama and literature.

Captain Singleton by Daniel Defoe, ed. Manushag N. Powell Broadview Press, 2019. 424pp. $17.95. ISBN 978-1554813414. Review by Srividhya Swaminathan, St. John’s University Captain Singleton is not often thought of as a masterpiece of the Daniel Defoe canon. In her introduction to the reissue of Shiv Kumar’s 1969 Oxford edition, Penelope Wilson deemed that the novel was not comparable in “literariness” because it was “a hasty attempt to repeat the success of Robinson Crusoe” (Oxford University Press, 1990, vii). As the first long work of prose fiction following the wildly popular Robinson Crusoe, this story returns to the themes of trade, commerce, and encounters with the Other; however, unlike Crusoe, Singleton ranges over vast geographical distances and interacts with a greater mix of peoples, both European and non-European. In scope, Singleton’s journey reads partly as a travel narrative (with colonialist overtones) and partly as pirate narrative (with mercantilist overtones), so critics point to a lack of internal cohesion that makes the novel difficult to discuss. However, scholarly interest in the text has been consistent, mainly because of the improbably rich detail of both Singleton’s journey across the interior of Africa and his success as a pirate in the Atlantic. As an adventure story, Singleton has a great deal a merit, so a teaching edition of this novel was long overdue. Manushag N. Powell’s carefully edited and meticulously researched edition does an outstanding job of combining interpretive lens and pedagogical glossing. In her introduction, she states that the edition is “specifically meant for the enjoyment of classrooms,” and she helps to frame a classroom accessible to specialists and generalists who might make use of the novel (9). The succinct, twenty-five-page introduction provides a useful overview of the scholarship around the novel— Singleton’s engagement with piracy and African enslavement; his strong homosocial or homoerotic bond with William; his creative description of unknown (during his time) global geographies—framing the text as providing greater nuance to the worldview that Defoe creates so vividly in Robinson Crusoe. Powell also suggests a useful interpretive lens to guide both teacher and student reading the novel. Rather than reconciling the bifurcated narrative or choosing to privilege one type of narration over the other, she reads the novel as Defoe’s response to English cultural anxieties about trade, commerce, and colonial acquisition. With its many shifting landscapes (and seascapes), Singleton’s story expands the ideas that were so compelling in Crusoe’s narrative. Singleton experiences various forms of captivity, turns to piracy, and finally retires in secrecy with his dubiously acquired fortune and close confidante, William. As he tries to find his place in the world, Singleton develops

ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University 326 Reviews as a character from an amoral young man who has been cast adrift from his sense of place and identity to a successful trader who forms strong ties through his friendship with William, the Quaker, to a home. Powell characterizes the novel as “a tale of a man fated to feel forever apart from humankind but still searching high and low for a sense of connection” (13). This act of searching—for human connection, for prosperity through trade, for a sense of place—comes through in Powell’s glossing of the text. Previous editions, specifically Kumar (1969, 1990) and the Furbank and Owens (2008), target specific audiences. Kumar’s annotations are primarily explanations of terms used in the novel and are aimed at students unfamiliar with eighteenth-century contexts. Furbank and Owens are oriented toward scholars. This edition seems more ambitious in appealing to teachers, students, and scholars alike. Reading the novel as a response to Crusoe, Powell includes short statements of comparison that would assist in teaching the two novels together. For non-specialists in particular, the explanatory footnotes provide helpful suggestions for how the text can be engaged to facilitate classroom discussion. For example, when Bob crosses the continent and suggests the idea of enslaving the native African population, Powell comments that “the complective otherness of Black Africans was one among a host of factors (including religion and culture) that made them appear, to the Europeans, as enslavable, but it was not the only driver of slavery” (103n1). These embedded points of discussion usefully contextualize the novel’s terminology and introduce a nuanced reading of detail. Some might find such interventions a bit heavy handed, but that would also prompt healthy classroom discussion. Powell’s notes do an excellent job of countering the colonialist impulse of the text. During the African trek, she repeatedly points to Singleton’s unwillingness and inability to acknowledge African agency in the slave trade, as well as how he does not make any attempt to learn the local language. Powell also includes helpful notes about the East India trade, particularly in Ceylon and the Malabar Coast, which highlights how extensive Singleton’s travels are. Broadview editions opt to include contemporaneous primary source materials rather than secondary sources. Powell’s carefully selected ex cerpts speak to both the travel narrative and the pirate narrative com ponents of the novel. Appendix A suggests a potential “Test-Run” for Singleton’s narrative in Defoe’s King of Pirates with a convincing fore word and strategic portions of the text. Powell’s extensive expertise in the depiction of pirates in the period provides for highly useful notes and primary source material in Appendix B. Appendix C includes ex cerpts from contemporary travel narratives from around the world,

ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University Critiques 327 not just Africa, to contextualize Singleton’s journeys. The strongest asset of this edition, and arguably its most innovative engagement with teaching the novel, is the manner in which Powell deals with mapping. She notes in her introduction that students consistently ask for a map of Africa when reading this text to help visualize Singleton’s fantastical, fictional journey. She includes in this edition two beautifully illustrated maps from Herman Moll: a 1716 map of Africa and a 1719 map of the world. These maps position Singleton’s narrative in the appropriate nexus of the fantastical, aspirational, and improbable. Powell’s edition will introduce generations of students to one of Defoe’s most wide- ranging adventure stories. Srividhya Swaminathan is Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies at St. John’s University in Queens, New York. Her research focuses on the transatlantic rhetorics of enslavement in the long eighteenth century.