England Re-Oriented: How Central and South Asian Travelers Imagined the West, 1750–1857 by Humberto Garcia. Cambridge University Press, 2020. 366pp. $114.95. ISBN 978-1108495646.

Review by Eun Kyung Min, Seoul National University, Republic of Korea

In this ambitious and capacious book, Humberto Garcia examines the writings of six travellers from India to England and Ireland between 1750 and 1857. The names of Joseph Emin, Mirza Shaykh I’tesamuddin, Dean Mahomet, Abu Talib Khan, Yusuf Khan Kambalposh, and Lutfullah Khan will probably be unfamiliar to most scholars of English literature, even though their writings were published in English in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, except Kambalposh, whose book was translated into English in 2014. As Garcia notes, these travellers do not make “a cohesive social group” (9); rather, they are a highly eclectic group in terms of origin, culture, class, and religion. Joseph Emin was a Christian Armenian who was born in Iran and moved to Calcutta; Mirza Shaykh I’tesamuddin and Dean Mahomet were Bengali Muslims (Mahomet later converted to Anglicanism); Abu Talib Khan was from an Azerbaijani Turkic family of Iranian stock that moved to Bengal; Kambalposh was from an Afghan family in Lucknow; and Lutfullah Khan was a Malwa Muslim. Socially, they belonged to different ranks as well. For instance, I’tesamuddin and Lutfullah were high-ranking diplomats who travelled through England in official capacity, while Emin began his life in England as a labourer—bricklayer, porter, and servant. They also wrote in different languages. As far as I can tell, Emin and Mahomet wrote in English; I’tesamuddin, Abu Talib Khan, and Lutfullah Khan wrote in Persian; and Kambalposh wrote in Urdu. So, we may ask, what precisely do these writers have in common? Garcia argues in England Re-Oriented that these “Asian mediators hold up looking glasses that expose the idea of a superior Europe as an ironic illusion” (33). “Because early Persianate travelers were not colonial subjects,” they understood Europe as “continuous with greater Eurasia, spanning north Africa, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Hindustan” (9, 2). These xenophilic travellers imagined that “an ethnic kinship” connected them to the English, and they performed a “trans-imperial masculinity” during their travels with the understanding that their adherence to the Persian ideal of javanmardi (“youth-manliness”) also aligned them with English codes of gentlemanliness (10, 5). Their writings, Garcia argues, prove that “orientalism and occidentalism are inadequate paradigms for understanding these travelers’ multimedia engagements in Georgian and Victorian Britain” (10). The “transcultural ideologies of gentlemanly civility” embodied in the six travellers’ accounts “run counter to occidentalizing strategies that organize races, languages, creeds, and sexualities in terms of East-West binaries,” and they effectively “challenge the clash-of-civilizations narrative as weaponized by Islamophobic politicians, academics, and media pundits” (13).

It is not always clear how sincerely these travellers believed in this kinship between India and Europe. Since all six worked in some capacity with or for the East India Company (EIC), they would have had compelling personal reasons to emphasize the continuities rather than the differences between their own cultures and British culture. I’tesamuddin, who played a central role in the transfer of power from Shah ʿĀlam II to Robert Clive and the English EIC, was sent by Shah ʿĀlam II to England to protest Clive’s failure to make good on his promises of economic and military aid. Caught in the uncomfortable role of negotiating a diplomatic task he knew was doomed to fail, and aware that he had become “the reluctant spokesperson for a duplicitous corporate body masquerading as a South Asian territorial power” (84), he had every reason to be as diplomatic as possible with regards to British culture and society in his writings. Emin, Mahomet, Abu Talib Khan, and Kambalposh built their careers in or through the EIC army and used the EIC as a means of social advancement, which gave them all strong incentives to portray English military culture in a positive light and to describe their social interactions in Britain in terms as egalitarian and hospitable as possible. Emin’s political project of Armenian independence depended on his ability to earn the friendship and patronage of the British upper class. Mahomet used his EIC army connections to travel to Ireland and then England, reinventing himself as an Indian immigrant businessman in Brighton, where he ran a fashionable curry restaurant and therapeutic—“shampooing”—massage business. As for Abu Talib Khan, who hoped to find a job in Britain teaching Persian to EIC recruits, much would have depended on how well he could earn the respect of “key empire builders” such as Lord Cornwallis and Henry Dundas (152). Garcia argues that, in the early days of Indian conquest, the EIC “morphed into an Asian territorial sovereign” and absorbed Persian culture for “pragmatic reasons” (16– 17). “Acting like javanmards,” Company men de-emphasized their difference and attempted to insert themselves into existing political culture by mimicking and “absorbing everything Persian” (18, 20). Clearly, this transcultural affinity was a “prescriptive fiction” for the EIC (21). To what extent were the six travellers simply playing along with this fictive game for their own purposes?

Against previous assessments that viewed these types of “Persianate travelers” as “mindless collaborators” devoid of “critical agency,” Garcia argues that these “trans-imperial subjects or go-betweens” were savvy performers who used the Company’s fiction against itself in order to criticize British imperialism (28, 29, 31). Claiming and cultivating a common ideal of masculine civility did not mean disregarding the political and cultural conflicts between the EIC and the diverse populations in India. Rather, it was a way to expose British imperialism as an “impostor” (23). At times, however, Garcia suggests that the travellers were genuinely committed to membership in a transcultural and “cosmopolitan Eurasia” (159). Garcia’s book persuasively points to the important role played by ideologies of masculinity in conceptualiz- ing this transcultural imaginary. One recurring question for me was how these ideologies intersected and interlocked with racial categories. Tony Ballantyne, Thomas R. Trautmann, and Peter Robb have argued for the centrality of the racialized ethnological discourse of Indo- European Aryanism in the search for commonality between India and Europe. It would have been helpful to read more about the relationship between the cultural discourse of Persianism and the racial discourse of Aryanism in the work of the six travellers.

The fact remains that these figures are singularly slippery and dis- concerting. It is startling to learn that Mahomet, who served in a Bengal unit of the EIC army, “tortured, massacred, and dismembered” enemies of the British alongside Company army men (140). The ideal “Persian manhood” (3) that these writers believed knitted them together with Europeans was underwritten by not only colonial conflict but also racism, classism, and sexism. Emin propagated racist stereotypes about Muslims and Jews, and wrote, “I wish poor Armenia had been so happy as is India and to have been taken by the impartial true hearted English nation” (55). I’tesamuddin, who played a vital role in paving the road for the EIC conquest of India, and who knew something of EIC treachery, declared that “the English system of government is the best in the world” (52). Garcia notes that “ideologies of whiteness underwrite his kinship with Britons” (122). I’tesamuddin wrote scathingly about the natives of Malacca, African “cannibals,” and the “dark-skinned, illiterate and stupid native Americans” (121). The idea of a transcul- tural, gentlemanly civility connecting Persia, India, and Britain was only, it seems, skin-deep.

Garcia does a heroic job with this difficult material, reading these men sympathetically without letting them off the hook. Personally, I found the analysis of the men’s attitudes toward British women to be the most interesting part of the book. Since the travellers came from cultures where women were segregated, they were startled to find themselves in close, public contact with British women. The conclu- sions they drew from this experience were quite different. Abu Talib Khan, who accompanied David Thomas Richardson, a Scots military officer in the EIC, on his return trip home and who was invited to “the homes, balls, clubs, theaters, and parties of late Georgian Britain’s glitterati” during his stay in England (175), moved among the highest echelons of British society. He met Queen Charlotte, was invited to a breakfast party at the house of the Duchess of Devonshire, Georgiana Spencer, and was introduced to the wives and daughters of powerful men. He also met actresses, singers, and courtesans. He was impressed by the beauty of British women and enjoyed their company; however, he was not convinced that British women necessarily had better lives than women back home. Comparing the segregated women in his home country to the free-ranging women in Britain, Abu Talib Khan noted, in defense of harem women’s liberty, that British women only enjoyed a superficial freedom. Asiatic wives lived in seclusion but were entitled to a dowry, inheritance, servants, and even divorce. British women, on the other hand, transferred their wealth and power to their husbands upon marriage. Kambalposh, who also came into contact with numerous British women “fairies” of surpassing beauty in London, came to rather different conclusions. After touring sites around London (St. Paul’s, Vauxhall Gardens, the British Museum, theatres, and opera houses), he criticized purdah (female seclusion) and the veil, even as he defended Islamic polygyny (247). Lutfullah Khan, who was similarly “bewitched by beautiful Englishwomen, the nymph[s] of Paradise,” was disconcerted by his encounters with “very indecently dressed,” licentious women who strayed far from the idealized image of Victorian femininity (267). Thrust into these challenging encounters with British women ranging all the way from Queen Charlotte and Queen Victoria to courtesans and prostitutes, these men had to invent coping strategies that would safeguard their male javanmardi while proving their sociability and civility on British shores. Invoking shared transcultural norms of masculinity helped these men build safe alliances with British men and women, but also enabled them to develop different gendered critiques of both British and Indian cultures.

Each of these six writers easily could have yielded a book-length study. In attempting to do justice to all six in a single book, Garcia tends to move hastily over historical background prior to launching into critical analysis of the texts. I cannot in good conscience wish that Garcia had written an even longer book, but while reading I did find myself wishing for more biographical and historical information about these male travellers. For instance, Garcia notes in passing that Mahomet was bigamous: he married an elite Irish woman named Jane Daly while in Ireland, then married Jane Jefferys of Bath after he moved to London, keeping his bigamy a secret. The stories of these six travellers are similarly full of puzzling details. Garcia’s book is likely to inspire a new generation of scholars who will pursue such leads with zest.

Eun Kyung Min is the author of China and the Writing of English Literary Modernity, 1690–1760 (2018) and Professor of English at Seoul National University.

Literary Authority: An Eighteenth-Century Genealogy by Claude Willan. Stanford University Press, 2023. 328pp. $80. ISBN 978-1503630864.

Review by Paul Keen, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

The story of the rise of modern forms of literary authority has been told in many ways. Most accounts focus on distinct aspects of the legitimation of an ideology of literary professionalism that drove a wedge between the aristocratic aura of patrician authors and the demonized spectre of Grub Steet hacks, those prostitutes of the pen who churned out writing that was at best forgettable and at worst immoral. These sorts of accounts tend to emphasize two contrary but fundamentally related aspects of the eighteenth century: the tumultuous impact of the literary marketplace, on the one hand, and the emergence of a bourgeois public sphere that was in the process of reconfiguring an entire network of various modes of authority, on the other. Writers inhabited the dangerous crossroads between them. Literary Authority: An Eighteenth-Century Genealogy takes a different approach by situating a largely formalist account of Alexander Pope’s literary self-fashioning within the fraught discursive world of early eighteenth-century politics. The final chapter explores Samuel Johnson’s efforts to supplant Pope’s pre-eminence, but Claude Willan’s real focus is on Pope’s extraordinary ability to redefine the codes of cultural authority by which his own success would be consolidated.

Michel Foucault defined genealogy as a historical commitment to the rediscovery of the struggles that helped to consolidate some forms of knowledge at the expense of others. In Willan’s study, this involves a careful analysis of the ways in which Pope was forced to establish his authority in the unpromising circumstances of the post-1688 era by rewriting his early Jacobite associations, channeling both the tensions of a highly partisan age and the contradictions within Jacobite poetry in ways that underwrote and disguised his own achievement of literary authority. If Percy Shelley’s description of poets as the unacknowledged legislators of the world remains a highwater mark in the kinds of ambivalence that haunt arguments for literary authority, a crucial part of Willan’s study turns on how Pope’s efforts to define his own literary authority a century earlier were shaped by the circumstances out of which this narrative would need to be forged. By the time of his “self-coronation in his 1717 Works,” things could not have been much worse (107). The Hanoverian reign was fully consolidated. The Whigs had taken power and were hard at work reforming Britain’s political landscape in their own image. The house of Stuart was in exile and the Tory party in shambles. The entrenchment of Protestantism as Britain’s state religion had hyped up the country’s anti-Catholicism.

Willan’s point is that, ultimately, Pope succeeded because of rather than despite these disadvantages. The age was nothing if it was not about new beginnings, and even if they were not the kind that Pope’s circle had in mind, this spirit of inventiveness could still provide the raw material for disparate renovation projects. “The momentous restructuring of political authority that took place under the Hanoverian dynasty,” Willan writes, “offered Pope a model for his own efforts to assume a position of analogous literary authority in the republic of letters” (107). Pope’s real genius may have been the strategic dexterity with which he converted these daunting challenges into the basis for his “self-coronation,” repurposing rather than merely jettisoning the literary tropes that had been central to Jacobite literary culture, in part by attempting the audacious task of welding them onto the dominant aspects of Whiggish ideology in an era when the political chasm between these perspectives seemed unbridgeable. Having come of age while he watched the Jacobite cultural resources that had provided his early foundation disappear from under him, this was no easy task: “With the sudden invalidity—or at least the marked and dominant suppression—of the political authority those forms had been designed to endorse, Pope had only a small window of opportunity in which to transfer their authoritative reference to a new object before they became irrecoverably dead metaphors” (144). As Willan points out, it is a mark of how fully Pope succeeded that centuries later “we choose Pope to represent the period notwithstanding the thoroughgoing failure of every cause he endorsed” (145). Reading Pope’s career against the grain of this historical legacy “shows what it would mean to read Pope without ‘Pope,’ as it were: not the story Pope told us to tell ourselves, but something more complex, more interesting, more layered, and more true” (137).

It is possible to overrate the originality of this sort of revisionary project. Pope’s gift for literary self-fashioning in the service of a relentless sense of personal ambition that was matched only by his prodigious creative talents is a familiar story. Most of us probably already think about Pope with regards to his gift for self-fashioning, but that does not mean everything valuable has been said about his skill. The originality of Willan’s contribution lies in his careful analysis of how Pope integrated the formal characteristics of Stuart and Whig cultural and political milieus, fusing “the pseudo-aristocratic exclusivity of Jacobite manuscript culture and the public-spirited nationalism of Whig literary culture” (136). Willan lays the groundwork for this analysis with a nuanced historical juxtaposition of the commitment of Whig writers such as Anthony Ashley Shaftesbury, John Dennis, and Joseph Addison to a commonwealth vision of systematization in which even Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity (or the law of attraction) could be embraced as a parable of polite sociability, with Jacobite culture’s emphasis on loyalty within a manuscript culture that favoured cryptic literary allusions as a politically expedient form of exclusivity. Pope’s poetry succeeded by tapping into both of these dynamics, schooling the nation on ethics in poems whose barrage of cryptic references conjured the in-the-know feeling of a Masonic handshake. Readers today may be less susceptible to Pope’s “goal of refashioning the terms of literary judgement, or literariness, into a supposed disinterest” than Willan suggests (15). These days, we tend to be fascinated by the ingenuity of Pope’s autobiographical sleights-of-hand rather than uncritically convinced to read his work “the very way that Pope gulled readers into being compelled to read it” (137). But Willan’s study offers an important new perspective on the intricacies of this con- juring act and, in doing so, adds a valuable reminder that “literary studies has not been a discourse wholly of our own making” (15).

Paul Keen is Professor of English and Associate Dean (Faculty Affairs) in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Carleton University. He is the author of, among other titles, The Humanities in a Utilitarian Age: Imagining What We Know, 1800–1850 (2020).

Backlash: Libel, Impeachment, and Populism in the Reign of Queen Anne by Rachel Carnell. University of Virginia Press, 2020. 312pp. $34.95. ISBN 978-0813944425.

Review by Nicola Parsons, University of Sydney, Australia

At the end of 1710, Sarah Cowper reflected in her diary on the year’s many events: she remarked, “Never before did I discern so great, so general a frenzy, possess human-kind” (Hertfordshire Archives, 2 December 1710). The frenzy Cowper records was sparked by Henry Sacheverell’s incendiary sermon repudiating the revolution principles of 1689 on a day usually reserved for their celebration; fuelled by his subsequent contentious impeachment; fanned by the publication of Delarivier Manley’s roman à clef, The New Atalantis, and her later arrest on charges of seditious libel; and culminated in a landslide Tory victory at the general election in the final months of 1710. Rachel Carnell’s Backlash takes this frenzy as its subject matter, framing the events as the flashpoint of a growing backlash against the several decades of political liberalization initiated by the revolution of 1688–89 in Britain. While the revolution inaugurated new individual rights, installed constraints on monarchical rule, introduced liberty of the press, and seemed to herald a new balance of power in Europe between Protestant and Catholic nations, the events of 1709–14 marked a dramatic volte-face as, through a series of public events including elections, the nation repudiated these emerging ideas in favour of partisan strife and a return to less tolerant times. Carnell’s innovation is to position these events not as the lagging conclusion of the Stuart seventeenth century but instead as anticipating more recent backlashes to the “progress of liberalism” (4), such as Donald Trump’s election to the US presidency in 2016 and the successful referendum, in the same year, that endorsed Britain’s exit from the European Union. Carnell uses this framing to consider from a new vantage point the confluence of events and actions that allowed the backlash that began in 1709 to gain momentum.

The first three chapters introduce, in turn, the book’s key figures— the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, Delarivier Manley, and Henry Sacheverell—concentrating on their respective situations in September 1709 while providing a concise narrative of how they had arrived at that point. Carnell deftly interweaves these stories in the following five chapters as she follows the arrest of Manley and the prosecution of Sacheverell, the Marlboroughs’ gradual loss of Queen Anne’s favour, the vigorous popular support for Sacheverell during and immediately after his impeachment, and how Tory supporters were able to leverage this support, in the form of public addresses, to influence Anne to call an early election that resulted in a landslide victory for their party. Even though Queen Anne is not a central figure in Backlash, Carnell is careful to ensure she does not fade into the narrative background. Instead, Anne’s commitment to the daily business of governing, her independence in choosing allies, her desire for moderation, and her skills of quiet diplomacy are all underscored, together with moments of considerable bravery—most notably, in deciding to send her own guard to quell the Sacheverell rioters and leave herself unguarded.

A major achievement of this book is that it narrates a complex story of the period that tracks multiple players without privileging a single protagonist. Carnell gives due weight to the agency, aspirations, and achievements of multiple figures. She also keeps alive the many factors that might have fed into a conservative backlash, such as the recent arrival of German refugees (commonly known as the “Poor Palatines”), a failed harvest, and the significant resources committed to the extended campaign in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701– 14). The resulting kaleidoscopic narrative conveys a vivid sense of events unfolding on multiple fronts and at speed. It is startling to realize, for example, that only fourteen days separated Manley’s appearance at the Queen’s Bench, which concluded by 13 February, from the commencement of impeachment proceedings against Sacheverell on 27 February, and that Harley, Sacheverell, and Manley all died within a seven-week span in 1724.

Backlash is an invaluable addition to Carnell’s significant body of work on Manley that emphasizes her professional and political commit- ments and the savviness and speed with which she wrote. Backlash positions the two volumes of Memoirs of Europe, published in May and November of 1710, as part of Tory efforts to shape public perception of the main actors in Sacheverell’s impeachment in advance of the anticipated official publication of the proceedings. Carnell points out that the printing of the first volume must have begun shortly after seditious libel proceedings against Manley ended, suggesting her professional con- fidence, and highlights the canny timing of the second volume, printed the very week in November 1710 that elections concluded. Backlash also provides an adept and engaging account of the court intrigue that accompanied the period’s prosecutions, publications, and popular unrest, particularly of the events that led Queen Anne to withdraw her favour— first publicly and then privately—from the Marlboroughs.

Linking the events of 1710 to the recent conservative backlash in the western world is most successful when it attends to the long-term implications of eighteenth-century innovations. For instance, First Lord of the Treasury Sidney Godolphin’s acumen in restructuring England’s fiscal system to allow the Bank of England to finance debt, establishing the mechanism for future mercantile and manu- facturing expansion, is made plain at the same time as the deleterious effects of the resulting “dream of growth” for future civilizations are emphasized. However, by trying to see everything at once—a narrative that takes in the whole of 1709–11 and that keeps recent events in view—it is perhaps inevitable that some details slip away. This is evident in the epilogue, which brings the events of the early eighteenth century into direct conversation with twenty-first-century events in the US and Britain. While this section of the book shows the differing gravity with which impeachment proceedings were regarded in 1710 and 2020, highlighting the distinctive arguments that proceedings turned on, elsewhere the discussion risks flattening out both periods in order to suggest points of direct connection.

Backlash offers an engaging account of the literature and politics of the early eighteenth century. It is especially effective in enlivening the period, conveying a rapidly shifting political and cultural landscape by way of its interwoven narratives.

Nicola Parsons is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature at the University of Sydney. She is the author of Reading Gossip in Early Eighteenth- Century England (2009), as well as numerous book chapters and journal articles, and the co-editor with Jennifer Milam of Making Ideas Visible in the Eighteenth Century (2021).

Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel by Jolene Zigarovich. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023. 280pp. $64.95. ISBN 978-1512823776.

Review by Heather Meek, Université de Montréal, Quebec, Canada

Early in Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel, Jolene Zigarovich provides an extensive inventory of the “mourning and funerary accoutrements” embraced by eighteenth-century Britons of the middling and upper classes, thus effectually dismissing any miscon- ception of a Victorian “monopoly on the cult of death and mourning” (18). The list, which includes “scarves, brooches, rings, miniatures, wax reliefs, armbands, hatbands, gloves, dresses, crape hats, buttons, shoe and knee buckles, toothpick cases, snuffboxes, stationery, funeral invitations and tickets, effigies, death masks, urns, and monuments,” is captivating in its suggestiveness and becomes even more so as we read on and learn that a few of these items were derived from or inspired by human remains (18). The book, as a whole, is less concerned with polite or pious mourning rituals than with “the circulating dead and dead-like body: dissected, embalmed, displayed, exhumed, preserved in spirits, molded from wax, composed of hair” (174); it offers discussions of embalmed bodies and body parts (chapter 2), wax replicas of the dead (chapter 3), woven hair bracelets (chapter 4), mourning miniatures made of bone (chapter 5), and skeletal remains (chapter 5). In its focus on these morbid things, the cultural practices that surrounded them, and their representations in contemporaneous fiction, the book enlarges current understandings of the British eighteenth century, specifically with respect to the tensions between the religious and the secular, the rise of a capitalist economy, and the formation of modern individualism.

Diving headlong into the material realities of eighteenth-century death and mourning rituals and drawing on a wealth of secondary and primary sources (not merely novels but also a range of texts on medicine, undertaking, anatomy, religion, and philosophy), Death and the Body succeeds in making the period at once eminently accessible and disconcertingly strange. In her descriptions of mourning objects and practices, Zigarovich points to an impulse to “immortalize the missing body” (173), which is in some respects consistent with a modern-day sensibility, while also tracing a less familiar inclination to fetishize the corpse and its parts. The 1759 William Hogarth illustration featured on the cover depicts a woman named Sigismunda grieving the loss of her lover Guiscardo by caressing his heart, a gesture that anticipates Mary Shelley’s acquisition of her husband Percy’s heart following his drowning in 1822 (75) and that reflects a practice of parceling out embalmed hearts and other viscera to loved ones. Zigarovich describes the embalmed bodies and bodily remains put on display in private homes and museums (chapter 2); the wax bas-reliefs, tableaux, and death masks of such luminaries as Isaac Newton, Samuel Johnson, Voltaire, Oliver Cromwell, and the Duke of Wellington, among others (chapter 3); the “several locks of hair” owned by Horace Walpole (137; chapter 4); the elaborate “posthumous circulation” of John Milton’s teeth, jaw, hair, “leg bone, ribs, and even one hand” (152; chapter 4); the journeys of Laurence Sterne’s skull (chapter 5); and the purported bones of Robin Hood’s famed companion “Little John” (184; chapter 5).

These extraordinary examples serve as mere starting points for an enthralling exploration of the significances and varied uses of these material objects. A discussion of hair jewelry and mourning rings, for instance, leads to a recognition of a “slippage between abject commodity and cherished relic, between fashionable display and emotional symbol,” which, in turn, speaks to “the broader cultural work of changing mourn- ing rituals in the period” (140). While mourning objects, according to Zigarovich, were interwoven with “fashion, display, and sentiment,” they demonstrate a genuine desire among the living to bind themselves to the dead (151), to memorialize individuals, and to stir up deep emotion. The book alludes to a compelling range of the uses of wax, which was important not only to the chandler and the priest, but also to the midwives and anatomists who manipulated it to create replicas of pregnant women, fetuses, and corpses for teaching, and to philosophers like Descartes, who evoked images of wax to illustrate the unreliability of the senses. The waxwork, more generally, served as an “uncanny replication of the human form,” thus embodying the intricacies of the human subject (103). Further illustrating “the fluidity and boundary crossing of most secular material forms in this period,” Zigarovich explains how the miniature could serve as memento mori but might also be displayed in curiosity cabinets alongside crucifixes, “pickled monsters,” and “petrified reptiles” (159).

Death and the Body approaches eighteenth-century novels as archives of evidence for contemporaneous mourning objects and practices, and, in its best moments, provides new interpretations of these novels. In a detailed reading of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–48), the heroine’s illness and death offer both an illustration of a Protestant “beautiful death” and an opportunity for an exploration of the necrophiliac tendencies of the notorious Lovelace. Zigarovich arrives at a captivating conclusion: while Lovelace fails in his desire “to preserve Clarissa’s beauty, bowels, and heart,” what “matters is that we witness the possibility of dissection, evisceration, and preservation” (93). Her reading of Clarissa allows her to answer the question “Were people embalmed in the eighteenth century?” with a “definitive ‘yes’” (94). The book presents other such collisions of fictional landscapes and historical realities: an episode in Eliza Haywood’s The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751) illustrates a contemporaneous tendency to feign grief as the eponymous protagonist “performs the rites of widowhood” following the death of her cruel husband; Richardson’s Pamela (1740) is evoked to show how the lower middle classes came to follow the fashionable mourning rituals of those above them; and the decomposing wax memento mori discovered by the heroine of Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) is interpreted as a representation of “enlightened materialism in all its decomposing, sweating, horrific glory” (24, 23, 130).

In its absorbing presentation of a vast range of examples of mourning objects and rituals, Death and the Body usefully provides an array of preliminary ideas and questions for further work on this rich topic, while also inviting, implicitly, illuminating connections between then and now. Its relatively brief discussions on the circulation of erotic wax female models, women’s modelling work, and British Egyptomania open possibilities for the study of literary representations of mourning rituals as they connect to women, gender, and empire. The main chapters of the book, to their credit, shed light only indirectly on death and mourning in the current moment, but Zigarovich’s brief afterword stresses, poignantly, the contemporary value of eighteenth-century necroculture, which, she explains, can be understood not merely as “obsessive and unhealthy,” or “funereal and melancholic,” but also as potentially inspiring, offering an alternative to “our cold and distracted approach to loss and mourning” (190). “Without a collective observance of death in the West,” Zigarovich concludes, “perhaps we can pivot our gaze to the past in order to recognize the emotional value of sentimental memorialization” (190).

Heather Meek is Associate Professor of English studies in the Département de littératures et de langues du monde at the Université de Montréal. She is the author of Reimagining Illness: Women Writers and Medicine in Eighteenth- Century Britain (2023).

Daniel Defoe in Context, ed. Albert J. Rivero and George Justice. Cambridge University Press, 2023. 380pp. $137.95. ISBN 978-1108836715.

Review by Kit Kincade, Indiana State University, Terre Haute, Indiana, United States

On the back cover, Daniel Defoe in Context indicates the perceived audience for this collection: these “short, accessible essays by leading scholars [help] students and general readers understand Defoe’s writing and the vibrant culture in which he lived.” Editors Albert J. Rivero and George Justice have collected forty-two essays from scholars in the field of Defoe studies specifically and eighteenth-century studies more generally. Wrangling this many scholars and topics for a book focused on one author is a noteworthy feat, and it demonstrates the range and reach that scholarship on Daniel Defoe has and continues to accrue. That being said, there are also potential pitfalls that a book attempting to be most things to many readers faces. There is an unevenness to the book as a whole that is not a reflection of any specific author, but is often a product of this type of endeavour.

While Rivero and Justice have marshalled a diverse array of scholars and topics, the organizational flow is inconsistent and could have benefited from some restructuring. The essays are ordered into six sections that cover topics about Defoe’s life, work, and times. The editors have given the reader an approximately two-page preface that is more of a brief introduction to Defoe than it is an introduction to the book. Given that sections range from the specific “The Monarchy and Parliament” to the vague “Social Structures and Social Life,” a road map for the reader to navigate sections and essays would have been helpful. This is especially the case since the book cover specifies that it is for students and general readers, not eighteenth-century literary critics or Defoe scholars.

Within each section is an array of essays whose length and order are incongruous. Most essays average five to seven pages, but they can be as short as three and as long as twenty-five. This in and of itself is not necessarily an issue, until one begins to examine the subjects covered in these lengths. Topics such as “Defoe and the Novel,” “Defoe and Religion,” and “Men and Women” are enormous and would have benefited from more space being allowed for their subject matter. “Defoe and Colonialism” comes in at only three pages. Bob Markley’s essay “Economics” is the longest, and he uses that length to substantially explore the intricacies of Defoe’s idealistic vision of commerce. There is variety in authorial approaches to writing on a particular topic that does work well in most cases. For instance, Barbara M. Benedict’s deep dive into Journal of the Plague Year (1722) showcases how Defoe combines literary genres in one work that exemplifies how he does this elsewhere in his writing, while Penny Pritchard canvases his religious writings to examine how Defoe creates religious connections to a broadly Protestant Christian readership. Yet, it feels in some case as if the topics have been shaved too thinly in order to spread them among more authors. For example, an extended discussion of marital law could have been included in the chapter on men and women. Also, one wonders why some chapters do not follow each other successively: “The Environment” is separated from “Defoe and Animals” by four chapters and “Defoe and Colonialism,” “Defoe and Slavery,” and “Defoe and America” are not consecutive.

An examination of the order of essays gives rise to other questions. For instance, there is an excellent chapter by Eugenia Zuroski about Defoe’s representations of and stance toward China, but there are no essays about other countries (the essay on America is about the continent). Surely there was room for the topic to be broadened to Defoe and Asia? And because of his extensive dealings with and travel to Scotland, it seems an essay on that subject would have been requisite. Also, while there are some really outstanding essays that aid in enlarging even the most well-read Defoe scholar’s understanding of him and his times—such as Maximillian Novak’s essay focusing on Defoe’s family and private life; or Nicholas Seager’s nuanced dis- cussion of Defoe’s complex political leanings; or Melissa Mowry’s nicely segmented subtopics that create an overview of London during his lifetime—there are some topics included that seem a bit curious for either a discussion of the man or the intended reader. For instance, Defoe did not write for, and wrote very little about, the theatre. He did not write pornography and only really addressed it in Conjugal Lewdness, a publication not often read by general readers. This is not a criticism of those chapters—the authors discuss with as much possible range as they can a subject about which there is not much to say, except in absences and negatives.

This brings up another consideration about the editors’ overall fields. While both have written about a variety of eighteenth-century literary subjects, neither is a Defoe scholar per se. This is not to say that one must write exclusively on a subject in order to edit a collection of scholarship on that subject, but there are times that this knowledge base both supports and enhances such a volume. There are those scholars in this collection who have written and studied Defoe specifically and extensively, and others who have been chosen, I would guess, because of their expertise in a particular field of scholarship that abuts Defoe as a topic. There are several Defoe scholars, for instance, whom I would have expected to see contributing to such a collection who are noticeably absent. Additionally, one of the hazards some of the contributors faced is not being familiar with some of the previous scholarship directly concerning their topic or not being familiar with which scholarship to avoid. For example, John Martin’s biography of Defoe (Beyond Belief, 2006) has been repeatedly debunked by J.A. Downie, Maximillian Novak, and John Richetti (to name a few), and yet the biography is cited as a source (189). This is one way that a deeper knowledge of the field of Defoe studies might have helped the editors guide their authors.

There are also a few errors/issues that the editors would have caught if they had been more familiar with the current field. For example, there is a mistaken reference to the publication by Pickering and Chatto of their Works of Daniel Defoe edition as “ongoing” (37) when the last volume of the series was published in 2011 and their publishing house closed in 2015 (the imprint has been acquired by Routledge). Another issue concerns the attention to attribution, which has sharpened the ways in which scholars approach both Defoe’s known and debatably assigned titles. Unfortunately, for example, an otherwise well-written and thoughtful essay on disability is marred by the substantial inclu- sion of works (two of the three discussed) that have been de-attributed by P.N. Furbank and W.R. Owens, as well as questioned by other Defoe scholars.

Additionally, although most of the essays in this collection are informative and interesting, not all seem geared for the intended audience of students and the general reader. Some of the pieces have an uncomfortable fit because the subject matter may be more scholarly or is geared toward a specialist’s interest rather than toward a readership unacquainted with literary and cultural studies fields. Others use language that may be more advanced than that of the audience this book is intended to reach. This, again, could have been mitigated by editorial intervention.

In the end, there are many informative, well-written essays in this book. The drawbacks to this collection pertain to details, but these details inform how the overall purpose will be received and understood by its specified readership.

Kit Kincade is Professor of English and Gender Studies who has published in the subject areas of Defoe Studies, Textual Studies and Bibliography, Eighteenth Century Women authors, and Jane Austen.

Women and Property Ownership in Jane Austen by Rita J. Dashwood. Peter Lang, 2022. 284pp. US$98.25. ISBN 978-1800797420.

Review by Lise Gaston, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

In the introduction, Rita J. Dashwood stakes her claim to the field, stating her book is the first “to consider the portrayal of gendered rela- tionships towards real property in Austen’s novels” (14). It is harder to fathom the claim that “property, both personal and real, and its role in the novels is a topic that has been generally neglected in Austen criticism” (23) because property implicitly or explicitly permeates historicist, economic, postcolonial, and other approaches to Austen’s fiction, at least since the publication of Alistair Duckworth’s The Improvement of the Estate in 1971 (172). Sandra Macpherson even suggests that “land law, rather than marriage or class, is the ground upon which Austen works out the way in which persons are, and ought to be, connected to others” (“Rent to Own; or, What’s Entailed in Pride and Prejudice,” Representations 81, no. 1 [2003]: 2). Dashwood is therefore astute to base her argument in Women and Property Ownership in Jane Austen on an original reading of Sense and Sensibility (1811): namely, the moment when Austen’s Dashwood women claim affective ownership over Barton cottage. Out of this scene grows the book’s central claim that Austen portrays an affective approach to property, one that legitimizes the “feelings of ownership” experienced by her female characters (4), who are otherwise legally excluded from owning real property. Austen makes visible the reality of capable female ownership decades before more widespread legal rights were granted to women.

In the first two chapters, Dashwood tracks women property owners, such as Pride and Prejudice’s Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Sanditon’s Lady Denham, and ineffective “pseudo-managers” such as Mansfield Park’s Mrs Norris, to position Austen in relation to eighteenth-century conduct book debates about education, the morality of property owner- ship, and gendered household management. Dashwood’s use of conduct books to situate Austen within a prolific contemporary discourse about education and bourgeois female management is a real strength of this book. However, in showing how widespread this discourse was—from Mary Wollstonecraft to Hannah More, “virtually every” conduct book author “shared a discontent with the current system of female education” (26)—it is unclear where Dashwood aligns Austen within this dialogue, despite unreservedly labelling her a feminist. The overall argument about Austen’s radical legitimization of female ownership is somewhat undercut by this plethora of bad examples. I disagree with the claim that characters like Lady Catherine and Lady Denham “are not interested in actively managing or improving their properties” (26)—they are only too interested, but their self-importance makes them terrible at the job. I take Dashwood’s point, however, that these ineffective or morally corrupt characters are, for Austen, results of a flawed female education system rather than a reflection of their gender. Chapter 3 gets to the heart of the argument, demonstrating the ways in which Austen’s characters create affective relationships toward ownership without legal grounds. The central part of this chapter revisits the reading of the Dashwood women claiming Barton cottage, which, while still convincing, repeats much of the introduction. Chapter 4 reads scenes in Austen’s early novels where the heroines visit their prospective husbands’ homes—including, of course, Elizabeth Bennet’s famous visit to Pemberley in Pride and Prejudice—which leads to a compelling discussion of the temporality and imaginative futurity of property. Again, Dashwood skillfully uses primary sources such as tourist guides to situate the heroines’ visits to the strange houses of not-quite-strangers. Dashwood’s use of David Hume, for whom all ownership originates in the imagination (180), is well argued, compelling, and original. I would like to see how this temporality affected legal ownership too, along with more discussion about the complex nature of property ownership in Austen’s time. While Dashwood clarifies that her focus in these readings is only on real property (freehold [9]), Mr Darcy’s ownership of Pemberley appears no different from Henry Tilney’s ownership of his parsonage (202)—even though clergy only had life interests, with precarious consequences for their female dependents, as Austen knew all too well.

This monograph seeks the empowerment of Austen’s heroines and makes broad, interesting claims for the power of fiction. Dashwood’s quotations from primary materials provide valuable readings of source texts. The methodology is refreshingly clear, and the argumentative style is innovative. For instance, Dashwood begins by offering her own affective response, a move often absent from academic criticism: “My first encounters with the [Barton cottage] episode left me with feelings of pity for these women due to all they had lost and would never regain … And yet in the course of writing this book I have realised that the arrival at [Barton] cottage was not the straightforwardly disheartening and pitiful moment that I had believed it to be” (1). Some arguments rely too much on vague claims about “complexity” (65), and there is a misreading of the order and naming of the Ward sisters in Mansfield Park. But the book raises an interesting question: Is the development of new, affective ways of relating to ownership really an active circumvention of the legal limitations under which women live, as Dashwood claims (3), or is it a way to work within the bounds of the law? At what point is an action—such as Austen writing her novels—a form of resistance (19), rather than simply a response? The exact nature of resistance is central to Dashwood’s argument, so it could bear more interrogation. If “Austen is at her most radical and original when she depicts the ways in which her female characters resist and ultimately overcome such displacements” (21), one could argue that they also “overcome” threatened displacements through marriage and coverture, the legal condition that circumscribes their property rights in the first place.

The challenge for Dashwood is that, as much as she may frame to the contrary, this is well-trodden ground. In the end, she makes a convincing case for the need to rethink relationships to property beyond legal ownership in Austen and other authors. Homeownership today is still prohibitive for a rising percentage of the population—a percentage exacerbated, then as now, for unmarried women.

Lise Gaston is a postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University. Her articles have appeared in European Romantic Review, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Nineteenth-Century Studies, and Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture.

Romantic Fiction and Literary Excess in the Minerva Press Era by Hannah Doherty Hudson. Cambridge University Press, 2023. 284pp. $110. ISBN 978-1009321969.

Review by Elizabeth Neiman, University of Maine, Orono, Maine, United States

The Minerva Press’s visibility to Romantic studies dates back at least a generation. By the turn of the twenty-first century, Michael Gamer, Ina Ferris, and Emma Clery had already shown that Minerva’s prolific output of novels influenced key trends and terms in the period: for example, Romantic ideas of originality and transcendence; increasingly gendered divisions between women’s writing and men’s; and nascent categories of high and low literature (Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation, 2000; Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels, 1991; and Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800, 1995). That this awareness of Minerva has not easily translated into interest in the novels themselves suggests the persisting power of the emergent classificatory system for evaluation that is Hannah Doherty Hudson’s focus. In the Romantic-era periodicals in which Minerva novels were first reviewed, reviewers initially read all new novels but began reviewing them in such a way that exonerated them from reading most. Minerva novels were consistently portrayed as imitative, poorly written, and ephemeral—and most notably, as Hudson points out, as “excess”: too long, too numerous, and altogether too much. But in excess of what—and for whom? In posing questions like these, Hudson creates a critical framework for exploring how novelists arm themselves with the same language as their reviewers. Over time (and many, many pages), novelists claim an authority and inventiveness that was simply not legible to critics, and, moreover, was apparently not designed to be. Novelists acknowledge the power of critics in shaping public perceptions of their work even as they also speak to each other and to their readers by fashioning an evolving counter-narrative about popular novels and their value. Rather than refute the critical commonplace (then and now) that Minerva novelists imitated Ann Radcliffe, Hudson contends that when novelists turned to gothic romance in the 1790s, they reframed imitation as expertise, authority, and opportunity for innovation. In turn, by the 1800s, we find that the many spin-offs inspired by Hannah More’s Coelebs (1809) gave Minerva’s novelists an opportunity to reimagine the ephemeral as timeliness—in contradistinction to the pervasive Romantic representation of literature’s timelessness. If these authors appear to laughingly sidestep any claim to the author’s immortality, by the final chapter, Hudson illustrates that this subject is no laughing matter to the novelists themselves. They put to their own use critical representations of their novels as fungible objects by fashioning themselves as labourers in a competitive market and their books as worthy of payment as any other made-to-order commodity.

Hudson focuses on clusters of novels published at key points in Minerva’s thirty-year run and paints a lively picture of the novel market while steering clear of evaluating the novels’ quality. This tightly focused yet ambitious study is written with an admirably light touch, given the complexity of handling obscure novels that can (in their “excess”!) make detailed analysis tedious to readers—and that sometimes admittedly veer into that lethal combination of overearnestness and bad writing. For example, Hudson handles one novelist’s frequent references to potatoes in the midst of a gothic-style drama by playfully cataloguing the “Gothic potato” as a Minerva motif while also identifying this motif as indicative of the serious theme of hunger. She then shows how this theme plays out in the later novels that focus on commodity and fashion (novelists use the dismissive language of excess to point to their own role in a market-driven economy and their desire to be paid).

Hudson, it seems to me, crafts her methods in part from the Minerva novelists she charts, from her playful tone to her noticeably collaborative style of engagement with others’ work (she cites frequently and, when taking an alternative path, does so without critiquing another’s perspective). Most notably, however, while Minerva novels generally figure as the many, and in correlation to the singular few (Godwin in chapter 2; Radcliffe in chapter 3; More in chapter 4; Edgeworth in chapter 5; Scott in chapter 6), it is the Minerva novels that provide new perspectives on the canonical materials discussed. In particular, beyond Minerva’s impact on the literary market (including what we find to be a compelling relationship with the periodical) Hudson aims to show that Minerva novels make stylistic choices that influence the novel’s developing form over the Romantic period. The most compelling evidence for this claim may be chapter 2’s reading of William Godwin’s Things as They Are (1794), in light of a cluster of Minerva novels with similarly political titles, such as Robert Bage’s Man As He Is (1790) and Eliza Parsons’s Woman As She Should Be (1793). Romantic-era reviewers’ representation of Minerva’s “excess” intersects powerfully with political discourse in the 1790s, Hudson shows, and in particular, the belief, upheld by Godwin, in print as a powerful medium to enact socio-political change without violence. That novels appeared to be everywhere and for everyone was particularly attractive to Godwin, who in the turbulent early 1790s felt the need to spread his ideas quickly. And yet, as Hudson points out, the novel’s supposed “excess” posed a particular problem for Godwin, who, while believing in the revolutionary potential of print, also presumed that the seed for socio-political change would be planted by writers like himself—those who have time and space to reflect on and challenge commonplace ideas about self and society. These ideas advance over time, by way of an ever-expanding group of writers. A large and growing popular readership meant, however, that no one writer could ever predict exactly who was going to read their work or how (Hudson later draws a similar conclusion when handling More’s apparent unease in writing a moralistic novel for a market-driven readership). We find that Godwin jettisons the multiple perspectives of the epistolary novel for just one point of view—Caleb’s. That readers encounter the narrative through just Caleb’s monolithic perspective makes Godwin’s message impossible to misread. By contrast, it is the Minerva novelist who sees potential in Minerva’s perceived excess (in this case, novels’ “bagginess” or tangential plots, stretched through multiple volumes, and also the multiple voices of the epistolary novel) for opposing view and perspectives. If, commercially speaking, such a novel could speak to many and would thus be a safe sell, readers are left to think for themselves and to weigh their own opinions, in contrast to Godwin’s top-down approach to knowledge dissemination. Hudson’s continued exploration of the counter-narrative novelists craft leaves open, however, the question of whether novelists continue to develop the novel’s potential for multiplicity in ways that might correlate to other experiments in voice or perspective.

When Hudson and I first met more than a decade ago at the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR) annual meeting, we were both startled (and, as we each later admitted, dismayed) to discover that the other was also writing a dissertation focused on Minerva Press novels. At the time, there had been no monograph on the Minerva Press published since Dorothy Blakey’s 1939 bibliographic study. In retrospect, it became clear to us both that it was a good thing to have company, and, as we increasingly found, we were hardly alone. Just as Hudson shows, in a competitive market, “each work stands to benefit from the successes of its peers” (92).

Hudson explains that she posits a “deliberately provocative re- envisioning” of the Romantic period as the Minerva Press era (23). The implications of this only partially tongue-in-cheek reframing gain resonance over the course of Romantic Fiction and Literary Excess, as, by the end, she draws from her findings to suggest that the Minerva Press era may in fact persist. Popular writers continue to craft narratives for readers and outside of the critical binary of literary/sub-literary that still to some degree orients literary studies, at least as a residual force. In her attention to Minerva novels, Hudson shows that how we read them is as important as whether we read them. In bypassing the evaluative binary of high/low that was initially forged by Romantic-era authors, Hudson writes a powerful counter-narrative about Minerva’s influence that conveys something of the particular spirit and pleasure of the novels for that second group of intended readers that is her focus— the many who actually read Minerva’s “excess” out of inclination rather than obligation.

Elizabeth Neiman is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maine, where she also directs the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies program. Neiman is the author of Minerva’s Gothics: The Politics and Poetics of Romantic Exchange, 1785–1820 (2019) and is currently working on a new book titled “Romantic Longings and the Novel: Sensing Imagination’s Limits.”

Romanticism and the Biopolitics of Modern War Writing by Neil Ramsey. Cambridge University Press, 2023. 286pp. $126.95. ISBN 978-1009100441.

Review by Matthew L. Reznicek, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States

In the introduction to his important volume Romanticism and the Biopolitics of Modern War Writing, Neil Ramsey makes a revelatory and profound claim, one that should perhaps be obvious but very much does not feel obvious. He notes that Romanticism “may have elided its violent contemporary history,” but, if it did so, it was “in large part because military literature, a modern war writing of military technicians, had become tasked with shaping a new understanding of history’s violence” (14). The intellectual contribution of Ramsey’s book is not only to bring to the fore an extensive collection of Romantic- period war writing, but in so doing to show precisely how cheek-by- jowl daily life and state-managed violence were in the Romantic period. The “new understanding of history’s violence” that emerges through the nuanced and sophisticated readings of manuals, biographies, memoires, and more canonical pieces of Romantic literature demonstrates how “military thought shaped elementary questions about the visibility of political conflict and its suffering” (14). To accomplish this, Ramsey subtly criss-crosses the binary between the specialist, technical writing and its popular counterpart, building an astute case for the everydayness of violence, war, and this new regime of Romantic literature.

Each chapter covers a different primary author or genre, reading that specific author and text in conjunction with broader Romantic cultural touchstones as well as through the politics of their varying aesthetics. For example, chapter 2 focuses on the Welsh military officer Henry Lloyd and his History of the Late War in Germany (1766). For Ramsey, Lloyd’s text represents a key aesthetic shift away from “narratives that operate within a community of great men and their decisive, commanding and exemplary actions” toward “a broader concern for statistics that underpinned late Enlightenment thought on the social, [in which] the individual soldier operates for Lloyd as something like a unit of analysis in calculating the effectiveness of strategic decisions” (92, 87). This “generic experimentation” counteracts the “neo-classical obsession with the ‘great men,’” so that “war appears to necessarily escape the full grasp of those who are waging and writing about their experiences, as history … becomes itself an object of critical attention and an artefact to be studied” (97).

A later chapter examines Charles Pasley’s Essay on Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire (1810), one of the first books to conceptualize military policy and to advocate for Britain to “conquer not just an insular but a universal empire across Europe” (151). For Ramsey, Pasley’s equation of military might with the health and vitality of the nation reveals a significant formulation of the biopolitical logic that unites these readings. Pasley typifies a genre of military writing that directly correlated “national vigour” with political economic thought on war and emerging concepts of population (161). For Britain to become a “military nation,” it must not only compete militarily with France but seek to establish a “universal empire” (165). This reconceptualization of the nation through its military capacity and its ability to claim imperial status reveals, again, Ramsey’s sophisticated connection between Romanticism’s associations with “the peaceful ambitions of modern liberalism” on the one hand and, on the other, a deep entanglement with a “paradigm of security” or “forms of security from which it purportedly remains distant” (182–83).

The chapter on Pasley, in particular, points to the deep entanglement of Romanticism with these contradictions. As Ramsey notes, Pasley’s positive reception “by so many British poets and novelists was in no small part due to their appreciation of these aesthetic qualities, the manly tone and vigour of his writing and what it therefore implied about the shaping of national identity and character” (183). Ramsey traces an appreciation for Pasley’s “moral purity and concern for the nation” in Austen’s celebration of his “manly writing style, healthy tone and heroic stance towards war” (183). Robert Southey praised his work, and William Wordsworth “even concluded that Pasley had written more as a ‘poet’ than a ‘statesman’” (183). As such, this para- digm of security provides a tantalizing opportunity to reread the attitudes toward war in some of the most celebrated, anthologized, and taught authors of the period.

What unites these different genres, authors, and philosophies is a compelling assessment of the biopolitical processes governing social, political, militaristic, and national changes. Throughout the analysis of diverse sources and authors, Ramsey provides an important reframing of Romanticism through biopolitics, building on a larger trend of Romantic studies. Ramsey’s contribution ultimately emanates from his ability to read “a bio-aesthetics that overlapped with Romantic organic thought to establish something approaching a human science of war concerned with the living forces that constitute military power”

(230). In the end, this enables the study to look forward toward “an alternative way of conceptualising the traumatic history of war, because it also highlights the ways in which biopolitical writing on war shapes the subjective experience of trauma” (230). It is hard to think of a more important contribution for this socio-political moment than to help scholars and students who struggle with the difficult task of understanding the relationship between trauma and violence.

Matthew L. Reznicek is Associate Professor of Medical Humanities at the University of Minnesota. He is President of The American Conference for Irish Studies and Editor-in-Chief of Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine.

Decoding Anne Lister: From the Archives to “Gentleman Jack,” ed. Chris Roulston and Caroline Gonda. Cambridge University Press, 2023. 287pp. $126.95. ISBN 978-1009280730.

Review by Ula Lukszo Klein, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, Wisconsin, United States

Decoding Anne Lister is the first ever scholarly, edited collection focused entirely on Anne Lister. As the title reminds us, the Lister archive as well as the life and legend of Lister have come to prominence lately in large part due to the successful HBO series Gentleman Jack (2019–22). The series, which streams on Max in the US and is co- produced by the BBC, has reached a far wider audience than previous film adaptations of Lister’s life and has galvanized public interest in Lister and her home Shibden Hall, in Halifax, UK. At the same time, however, Lister, her life, and her sexually explicit diaries remain a niche interest both in popular culture and within academic circles. Lister’s diaries were rediscovered in the 1970s and 80s by researcher Helena Whitbread, who undertook to publish fragments of them under the title I Know My Own Heart in 1988, the first fragments of the diary to be widely available in print. In the collection’s note on the text, however, we learn that there is no critical edition yet of Lister’s papers (her diaries and letters), which has hampered critical work on the Lister archive (xvii). Co-editors Chris Roulston and Caroline Gonda have dedicated their scholarship overwhelmingly to bringing the stories, texts, and lives of queer women of the long eighteenth century into conversations about aesthetics, periodicity, proto-feminism, and many other discourses. Here, they bring their knowledge and expertise to the topic of Lister, including in this collection a wide range of voices and approaches on the topic of Lister studies.

The essays in Decoding Anne Lister often focus on understanding Lister through the lens of her time period as well as her own writings, both as a way of better comprehending queer people like Lister and as a way of understanding the time period she lived in. The first two sections on her relationship to natural history as well as her linguistic innovations situate her sexual knowledge within the medical and anatomical dis- courses of her time and their relationship to lexical practices. Laurie Shannon’s essay starts the collection by situating Lister’s identity within nineteenth-century discourses of natural history, which Lister used to stake her “unwavering claim that ‘Nature’ authorized what she called her ‘oddity’” (29). Lister’s interests in the sciences and anatomy are followed by Anna Clark’s in-depth discussion of how Lister’s anatomical self-instruction was often foiled by the scientific and pseudo-scientific anatomical literature she read. These two essays, along with Gonda’s interview with Whitbread, bring to the fore two important initial questions that many readers, especially those relatively new to Lister studies, will have when approaching the collection: How did Lister studies begin? And how did Lister think of herself and her sexuality? The latter question continues to be discussed in the next section of the collection on Lister’s reading and writing habits. Together, Stephen Turton’s discussion of Lister’s idiosyncratic linguistic innovations and Caroline Baylis-Green’s use of recent work on literary and sexual closets and closeting give readers a more complete sense of the content and the formal aspects of Lister’s diaries, especially her use of the cypher she called “crypthand.”

These sections give readers a wonderfully detailed and theoretically nuanced introduction to Lister studies, while also making important new contributions to this area. Yet some of the contradictions of Lister’s life, especially her political and social conservativism, are not clarified until the middle of the collection, with Susan S. Lanser’s detailed discussion of what we know and do not know about Lister’s feelings on topics such as electoral reform, slavery, and Catholicism. In some ways, a lengthier introduction or a separate chapter with a more filled- out biographical sketch of Lister’s life might have been useful at the start of this collection. That issue aside, Lanser’s essay together with Cassandra Ulph’s discussion of Lister’s participation in local Halifax leadership societies and electioneering help paint a multidimensional, layered portrait of a person who benefited from her position in society as a landed, wealthy Tory, but who was also disenfranchised by her gender. Curator Angela Clare’s contribution in this section provides a fascinating alternative viewpoint to the history of Shibden Hall as both Lister’s home and a tourist site today, though it does not really fit into the section on Lister’s politics.

The section on Lister’s travels pairs two very different and yet equally intriguing texts that give readers a hint of the importance of Lister as a woman travel writer of the nineteenth century. Kirsty McHugh’s essay situates Lister’s writing within travel writing studies, before turning to Lister’s domestic travel writing. The second essay is an excerpt from Angela Seidele’s book Time Travels: Four Women, Two Centuries, One Journey (2018; printed originally in German as Zeitreisen. Vier Frauen, zwei Jahrhunderte, ein Weg; translated by Katy Derbyshire). Seidele and her wife Suzette undertook the journey to Russia and the Caucasus in Anne Lister and Ann Walker’s footsteps, penning a book that combines accounts from Lister’s diaries, the travel guides to the Caucasus that Lister and Walker used, as well as Seidele’s own reactions to the landscape. Together, these two chapters make a strong case for the importance of Lister as a travel writer while indicating the exciting work ahead for scholars working on women’s or LGBTQ+ travel writing prior to 1900. The collection concludes with separate essays by editors Gonda and Roulston that reflect on and analyze contemporary reactions to Lister, her gender identity, her sexuality, and her representation in the television show Gentleman Jack. The final chapter presents an in-depth interview with the show’s creator, Sally Wainwright, conducted by author Emma Donoghue. Gonda’s and Roulston’s essays could have easily begun this collection rather than concluded it, for they offer important insights into the contradictory reactions to Lister’s gender nonconformity and sexual identity. Both authors focus on how Lister’s “complicated” identity can open up larger discussions around the history of gender and sexuality. In writing about fan reactions to Gentleman Jack, Roulston notes, “paradoxically, it is Lister’s absence of identificatory language that created a strong identification among her fans” (247). This final section drives home the fact that Lister studies, like many areas of study within the history of sexuality, is always impacted by the emotions that we as scholars invest into the subjects of our research. Rather than seeing this investment as an obstacle, the collection embraces this aspect of scholarship, revealing how timely, moving, exciting, and relevant Lister studies are not only for the history of sexuality but also for many other areas of study, including the history of science, lexicography, travel writing, and political and economic history. The collection succeeds as an overview of Lister studies at this moment in time as well as a rigorousintervention into queer studies and history of sexuality studies.

Ula Lukszo Klein is Associate Professor of English and Director of Women’s & Gender Studies at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. She is the author of Sapphic Crossings: Cross-Dressing Women in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (2021), and she is currently working on an article about Mlle la Chevalière d’Eon.

Theology in the Early British and Irish Gothic, 1764–1834 by Sam Hirst. Anthem Press, 2023. 248pp. $110. ISBN 978-1839981531.

Review by Jarlath Killeen, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

In A Secular Age (2007), a monumental analysis of the religious landscape of modernity, sociologist Charles Taylor influentially argues that, unlike our prehistoric, ancient, and medieval forebears, we no longer live in an “enchanted world” populated by supernatural and pre- ternatural beings. Taylor’s study worries away at the many factors that created this “disenchanted world,” though he does not include the arrival of the gothic novel in 1764 and its subsequent “effulgence” in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as Robert Miles once memor- ably put it, as one possible contribution to the secularization process. Others, however, have long been making the case that the gothic is one of these forces of disenchantment and secularization—indeed, this has become one of the dominant currents in contemporary gothic studies. Influential critics have read gothic fiction as a rejection of the medieval world (a world that was chock-full of the spiritual) and an embrace of materialist modernity. This modernity is Protestant, it is true, but one in which the forces of the supernatural are certainly not at any real work, and where God himself has taken a backseat, satisfied with observing the universe from a safe distance and not at all inclined to intervene directly in human affairs or to send his minions to take care of things. In an influential formulation, for example, Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall argue that gothic fiction “is essentially Whiggish … [the gothic] delights in depicting the delusions and iniquities of a (mythical) social order and celebrating its defeat by modern progressive values” (“Gothic Criticism,” in A Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Punter [Blackwell, 2000], 220). For Diane Hoeveler, expanding on an important argument first articulated by Terry Castle in 1995 about the shift from theological to psychological explanations for supposedly supernatural phenomena, the gothic involves “secularizing the uncanny” (Hoeveler, Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imaginary, 1780–1820, 2010; Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny, 1995). The demons, ghosts, and spirits of the gothic novel, when they are not being revealed as manufactured by very human agents or simply conjured up by overactive and overstimulated minds (the famous “explained supernatural” Scooby Doo strategies of Ann Radcliffe), are eventually exorcized and banished from the world, which can then carry on as if they never existed in the first place.

This position, it has to be said, is very much (and perhaps ironically) the opposite of the one maintained by intrepid scholars like Montague Summers and Devendra P. Varma, who were responsible for getting scholarly attention directed toward the much-derided gothic novels in the first place in the mid-twentieth century (Summers, The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel, 1938; Varma, The Gothic Flame: Being a History of the Gothic Novel in England, 1957). For these early explorers, the gothic novel was the (religion-infused) flip side of a rational Enlightenment project, the very project that was denuding the world of theological and spiritual colour and light. For Varma and Summers, if modernity signalled the “decline of magic” in Keith Thomas’s words (Religion and the Decline of Magic, 1971), then the gothic was an attempt to re-enchant that world, to reaffirm belief in another reality just below the surface of what appeared to be everyday life, a reality always on the verge of bursting into that world in an effusion of violence and horror (or, in the case of a writer like Clara Reeves, as politely as possible).

If the advocates of a thoroughly secularizing gothic have seen off the early theological cheerleaders, more recently a new cohort of thinkers has coalesced around two different but often connected contentions: that we do not, in fact, live in a secular, disenchanted world at all and that (even if we do) gothic fiction is not a contribution to disenchantment. In The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (2017), Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm controversially insists that large numbers of even the most irreligious believe that we are living in a world deeply infused with the magical and the spiritual, and, moreover, he points out that the most significant theorists of disenchantment and secularization (Max Weber, and the members of the Frankfurt School) were products of occult cultures and were very aware of and reacting against those cultures. In gothic studies, Alison Milbank has insisted that the gothic is a “mode of religious historiography” that became ever more theological as it developed, pointing “like the Gothic arch, upward, towards transcendence” (God and the Gothic: Religion, Romance and Reality in the English Literary Tradition [Oxford University Press, 2019], 305). Both scholars are referenced in Sam Hirst’s invigorating contribution to this intense theological debate, Theology in the Early British and Irish Gothic, 1764–1834. Hirst’s book is narrowly focused on the so-called gothic “first wave” between the publication of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Mary Shelley’s “The Mortal Immortal” in December 1833. It considers an impressive variety of canonical and marginal texts as deliberate interventions in theological debates of the period, debates that consistently invoked religious and theological ideas. For Hirst, these novels demonstrate the ability of the gothic mode to “engage with, interrogate, critique and support various contemporary Dissenting and Anglican theologies” (7).

What Hirst brings to the debate about the place of theology in gothic studies is an in-depth knowledge of the flexibility and reach of theological ideas in the period under review. The book demonstrates how theological ideas inform the way writers invoke, for example, the sublime, or prophetic dreams and nightmares. Hirst brings forgotten theories, such as John Dennis’s view of God as the “highest sublime,” and neglected arguments, such as the relationship between the demonic and the “negative sublime,” back into the critical conversation. Hirst makes the point that many otherwise impressive and important scholars of the gothic are theologically tone deaf and have simply misunderstood or overlooked theological echoes in these gothic landmarks. In particular, Hirst criticizes the obsessive focus in gothic studies on both the political and the psychological at the expense of the theological. To take a repre- sentative example, in a reading of the dreams and nightmares of The Old English Baron (1778) and The Monk (1796), Hirst persuasively argues that an understanding of sleeping thoughts as either “tools of providence” or temptations of the demonic is more significant than psychosexual or even medical/materialist interpretations.

It is hard to see, after this study, how the gothic can continue to be read as a rejection of theology (even if most critics will probably continue to be uninterested in this area), though I was disappointed that Hirst was not even more vigorous in proposing the gothic as a potentially theological genre for writers interested in questions of “ultimacy,” such as the existence of God, the true nature of ultimate reality, the meaning of good and evil, and the means of achieving salvation and damnation. Unlike Milbank, who insists that gothic novels are creative theological exercises, that the gothic is a kind of theology, Hirst retreats to the safer position that “not all Gothic novels address theological questions so overtly … [though] many do” (2). To me, this phrasing concedes rather too much to the anti-theological analysis of the critics against whom much of the study is ranged. Still, this book is a substantial contribution to a growing body of gothic criticism that (finally) takes the theological seriously.

Jarlath Killeen is a lecturer in Victorian Literature at the School of English, Trinity College Dublin, and the current Head of School.