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Eighteenth-Century Fiction Volume 33, No. 3 (Spring 2021) Articles Reviews/Critiques

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Eighteenth-Century Fiction Volume 33, No. 3 (Spring 2021) Articles Reviews/Critiques ECF Eighteenth-Century Fiction Volume 33, no. 3 (Spring 2021) Articles Reading Lovelace’s “Rosebud”: Credits, Debits, and Character in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa Kathryn Blakely 329 Clarissa’s Commerce: Relocations and Relationships in London Elizabeth Porter 349 Mother Gin and the Bad Examples: Figuring a Drug Crisis, 1736–51 Nicholas Allred 369 The Survival of Non-Productive Labour in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man Konstantinos (Kos) Pozoukidis 393 Reflections Are We Global Yet? Africa and the Future of Early Modern Studies Wendy Laura Belcher 413 Reviews/Critiques Ian Watt: The Novel and the Wartime Criticby Marina MacKay Review essay by John Richetti, University of Pennsylvania 447 Enlightened Immunity: Mexico’s Experiments with Disease Prevention in the Age of Reason by Paul Ramírez Review by Travis Chi Wing Lau, Kenyon College 451 Granville Sharp and the Zong Massacre: Sharp’s Uncovered Letter to the British Admiralty, ed. Michelle Faubert Review by Cassander L. Smith, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa 453 The Wreckage of Intentions: Projects in British Culture, 1660–1730 by David Alff Review by Erin Drew, University of Mississippi 455 ECF 33, no. 3 © 2021 McMaster University ii Systems Failure: The Uses of Disorder in English Literature by Andrew Franta Review by Sean Silver, Rutgers University 458 Bellies, Bowels and Entrails in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Rebecca Anne Barr, Sylvie Kleiman-Lafon, and Sophie Vasset Review by Kelly McGuire, Trent University 461 Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century by Christina Lupton Review by Kathleen Lubey, St. John’s University 463 Women’s Domestic Activity in the Romantic-Period Novel, 1770–1820: Dangerous Occupations by Joseph Morrissey Review by Freya Gowrley, University of Derby 466 Maternal Bodies: Redefining Motherhood in Early America by Nora Doyle Review by Andrea Charise, University of Toronto Scarborough 469 Écrire en Europe. De Leibniz à Foscolo, éd. Nathalie Ferrand Critique littéraire par Michael Mulryan, Newport University 472 Anecdotes of Enlightenment: Human Nature from Locke to Wordsworth by James Robert Wood Review by Kristin M. Girten, University of Nebraska, Omaha 475 The Origins of the English Marriage Plot: Literature, Politics and Religion in the Eighteenth Century by Lisa O’Connell Review by Laura Thomason, Middle Georgia State University 478 When Novels Were Books by Jordan Alexander Stein Review by Annika Mann, Arizona State University 480 Loving Justice: Legal Emotions in William Blackstone’s England by Kathryn D. Temple Review by Mark Canuel, University of Illinois at Chicago 483 La Galanterie, une mythologie francaise by Alain Viala Review by Andrew J. Counter, University of Oxford 486 Poetics of the Pillory: English Literature and Seditious Libel, 1660–1820 by Thomas Keymer Review by Paul Keen, Carleton University 489 ECF 33, no. 3 © 2021 McMaster University Book Reviews/ Critiques de livres Review Essay Ian Watt: The Novel and the Wartime Critic by Marina MacKay Oxford University Press, 2019. 240pp. $34. ISBN 978-0198824992. Review by John Richetti, University of Pennsylvania I knew Ian Watt quite well, and I remember reading an essay he had published about his horrendous wartime experience: he spent three and a half years in the infamous River Kwai camp, where the inmates were forced to work under horrific conditions on the construction of the Burma-Thailand Railway (made famous by a David Lean film, that Watt by the way loathed, The Bridge on the River Kwai [1957]). Watt was strong enough to survive the brutal treatment of his captors, but Marina MacKay argues in her book that his years in this dehumanizing prisoner-of-war camp “helped to shape his hugely influential scholarly work, and, more broadly ... the extent to which the historiography of the novel is bound to the historical events of the mid-century” (2). No one before her has made this connection, and I think there is a good deal to be said for it. Certainly, as my interactions with him at Stanford showed, he never forgot his experiences in the camp, and with good reason— they were searingly traumatic, and many of his fellow prisoners died. Despite Ian’s painful wartime experiences, I never found in his scholarly work on the eighteenth-century novel and on Joseph Conrad any sign that his history affected his critical writing. Ian Watt: The Novel and the Wartime Critic does not claim that there are direct or obvious references in Watt’s work to his prisoner-of-war experience. MacKay argues, however, that there are frequent “incomplete and private references” (54). She cites a passage at the close of Watt’s discussion of Robinson Crusoe in The Rise of the Novel and then generalizes about her approach to Watt’s criticism in which she writes that he “thinks through painfully distinctive modern experiences: problems of subjectivity, individuality, and the demands of communal existence; the lived effects of violence, dispossession and fear” (55). Indeed, his colleague at Stanford W.B. Carnochan, in the afterword to the 2001 edition of The Rise of the Novel, noticed a similar link between the POW camp experience and Watt’s admiration for Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson. Watt wrote that “[Defoe], among the great writers of the past, has presented the struggle for survival in the bleak perspectives which recent human history has brought back to a commanding position on the human stage” (The Rise of the Novel [1957], 134). Of Eighteenth-Century Fiction 33, no. 3 (Spring 2021) ECF ISSN 0840-6286 | E-ISSN 1911-0243 | doi: 10.3138/ecf.33.3.447 Copyright 2021 by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, McMaster University 448 Reviews course, something similar might well be said of many literary critics who did not have Watt’s traumatic history, although MacKay’s ultimately convincing point is that such an emphasis is stronger and is relevant to an understanding of Watt’s critical works. An important feature of this book is the emphasis on the remarkable longevity of The Rise of the Novel, more than sixty years old and still in print. It remains a standard work for students of the early English novel, even in the face of a good deal of disagreement with its approach and rejection of its major conclusions. MacKay cites Nicholas Seager’s work surveying eighteenth-century English novel criticism in which he finds that Watt’s book has been “more often caricatured than consulted” (53). Some older readers of this journal may remember, however, and perhaps like me have a copy of the special expanded issue, a substantial book, of Eighteenth-Century Fiction called Reconsidering the Rise of the Novel (ECF 12, nos. 2–3, 2000), with an introduction by David Blewett, the founding editor of this journal, who remarked on “the remarkable staying power of a book that may be said to have opened up eighteenth-century fiction as an area of serious scholarly investigation” (141). The ECF volume begins with an essay by Watt, which Blewett called “a fascinating slice of intellectual autobiography” (141)—“Flat- Footed and Fly-Blown: The Realities of Realism”—that outlines his intellectual development from Cambridge English to Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School as well as his own commitment to strictly “literary” values rather than what he characterized as fashionable pseudo-philosophical theorizing about the nature of literature. The ECF issue features, along with sixteen other eighteenth-century scholars’ contributions, my own essay that tries to build on Watt’s work. Some of these essays, to be sure, were critical of The Rise of the Novel, but other essays were extensions of Watt’s work or explorations of the implications of his notions about the novel’s rise in Britain. To cite a couple of examples of the highest praise for Watt’s work, Michael Seidel observes “no one ... has ever convincingly displaced Watt’s notion of formal realism as a dominant characteristic of narrative during the early eighteenth century, particularly in England” (194). Or as Michael McKeon points out with rigorous theoretical exactness, Watt’s work belongs in the company of definitive and influential work by Lukács, Ortega, and Bakhtin. Watt had died, at 82, in December 1999, and the special issue was a tremendous tribute to him and his groundbreaking work, The Rise of the Novel. In the twenty years since that ECF special number appeared, I have been puzzled by many younger scholars’ dislike of a book that I revere ECF 33, no. 3 © 2021 McMaster University Critiques 449 and to which I return often for its insights. I can only partly attribute the disparagement of The Rise of the Novel to inevitable Oedipal rejec- tion of the father. Or perhaps to Watt’s neglect of the women novelists from the early years of the eighteenth century troubles scholars who are attentive to recent feminist emphases in the field. Michael Seidel in the ECF special number offered a perceptive list of objections to Watt’s thesis: “His failure to understand the inherent generic instability of the novel form, his misapprehension of the reading audience for fiction, his reluctance to acknowledge the existence of realist fiction much earlier and in other places than England, and his blindness to the insight that realism is little but another fiction, to his hesitancy to condemn realism as part of the corrupt Western bourgeois ethos” (194). In my view, none of these objections, some of them untrue or exaggerated, cancels the insights found in The Rise of the Novel. MacKay’s compelling discussion of the influence of prison camp life on Watt’s approach to the early novel begins persuasively in chapter 2, “Defoe’s Individualism and the Camp Entrepreneurs.” She argues that the unforgiving sauve qui peut atmosphere of the prison camp affected Watt’s conceptualizing of the individualist rapacity of some of Defoe’s protagonists, especially Moll Flanders.
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