Reviews

Reading It Wrong: An Alternative History of Early Eighteenth-Century Literature by Abigail Williams. Princeton University Press, 2023. 328pp. $37. ISBN 978-0691170688.

Review by Melanie Holm, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, United States

It is well known throughout eighteenth-century studies that the shift from a patronage system of authorship to the commercial marketplace stimulated new and diverse populations of readers whose interactions with a given text were necessarily different in both degree and kind. Let us suppose that this complex ragu of readings, reading practices, and behaviours could be recovered for a given collection of texts. In what ways might this hypothetical archive influence contemporary pro- fessional engagement? Reading It Wrong does not answer this question but urges the necessity of asking it. Abigail Williams’s thoughtful, well- researched, and ambitious book illuminates the tendency of scholarship to encourage a de facto segregation of ideal and non-ideal, elite and non- elite, and intended and unintended readers to challenge the habitual devaluation and effective erasure of the latter. Rather than a paean to generative misreadings, Reading It Wrong explores evidence of confusion and misunderstanding among early historical readers of Augustan satire. Since their publication, these texts have explicitly teased the possibility of “right” reading. Williams argues that the temptation to pursue this goal alone in critical analysis has produced a partial, prejudiced, and ignorant history, which her “alternative history” seeks to informatively unmask.

In part 1 of 2, chapters 1–4 illuminate historical shifts in understanding what it means to read right or to be a good reader. In part 2, chapters 5–9 study interactions between misunderstanding readers and the texts they misunderstood, and the effect the developing culture of correct or incorrect reading had on authors and their texts. Chapter 1, “The Good Reader,” begins the story of right and wrong reading in medias res, addressing the present reader in the second person to provide a critical genealogy of twentieth- and twenty-first-century right-reading biases. These biases, Williams argues, are predicated on the assumption of a singular right reading easily accessed by readers—at least so-called elite readers—in that historical moment, ones equipped with the knowledge and skills to access authorial intentions. Williams argues this practice especially accompanies pedagogical approaches to eighteenth-century satire aimed at developing expertise enabled by critical editions, such as the Yale Poems on Affairs of State (ca. 1960–80). However, as her analysis will demonstrate, such was not necessarily the case for the genre’s readers and authors. Furthermore, she contends that privileging informed, right reading in the classroom and criticism creates an inaccurately anachronistic view of reading practices such that “we have reverse-engineered our own desire for certainty of interpretation onto the readers of the past” (36).

Successive chapters examine how the debates within different reading hermeneutics established conditions of possibility for early eighteenth- century readership and variable interactions with texts. Chapter 2, “The Christian Reader,” looks at archival evidence of reader confusion to elucidate the anxieties fostered by the doctrine of sola scriptura. Williams depicts an emergent culture of non-specialist concern for biblical comprehension influenced, though not determined, by education and class. She makes her case by arguing that the proliferation of explanatory guides indicates large-scale desires to ensure the right reading, and more impressively in archival analysis, with an attention to the link between textual markings and uncertainty. This methodology conspicuously critiques the common practice of mining marginalia for certitude.

Chapter 3, “The Classical Reader,” considers how readers’ differently mediated relationships with the classical world influenced and produced different understandings of what books were for and the kinds of meaning they could produce. With her notable archival sensibilities on display, Williams shows that expectations of classical knowledge and language proficiency implied a sense of belonging from which some readers could identify the misreading of authors and translators with textual corrections and emendations. Contrastingly, she uncovers evidence of how language ignorance enabled idiosyncratic reader behaviour, such as in the case of a woman reader of Dryden’s Satires of Juvenal and Perseus whose expressed interest was less in the quality of translation than in cross-referencing episodes of classical history, an area in which she would likely have had greater confidence. The argument then shifts to consider how cultural attitudes and positions aligned with the opposing sides of the Ancients and Moderns debate championing different models of reading and accusing the other of necessarily reading wrong.

The claims for right reading in chapter 3 introduce the nascent idea of literary expertise, which is the explicit focus of chapter 4, “The Literary Reader.” Williams looks at how the desire to be a competent reader developed alongside a culture of literary experts proposing to guide less-informed readers to a higher state of understanding. The range of sources implicated in the expertise industry is impressive and thoughtful, emphasizing how expert promises of making texts more accessible simultaneously reinforced divisions and exclusions along the lines of status, education, and gender. Williams theorizes that granting access to culture was necessarily synonymous with defining it. However well-meaning, separating high culture from low ironically drew cultural boundaries that reinforced the aura of exclusivity by enabling the excluded to peer through the keyholes of the elite’s locked doors. A wealth of textual evidence, including indexes, reader guides, and periodicals, supports this argument. Nevertheless, analysis sometimes slips into speculation, deducing mockery from speculations of an author’s intention, such as in the case of an inquiry printed with an edifying reply in the Athenian Mercury concerning the simultaneity of expulsive bodily functions. What Williams reads as ridicule need not be taken as disingenuous. While toilette humour has become a standard-bearer for low culture today, the prevalence of bodily wastes in the period’s principal satires suggests a more general engagement with the lesser products of the body than her critique would imply. The argumentative force of the chapter is not lessened by such moments; instead, they demonstrate the very tensions at issue.

The second part of the book explores how these tensions shaped literary production. Chapters are anchored by readings of well-known Augustan texts, which are exemplary cases of the culture of misunderstanding’s effect on authors and the author-reader relationship.

Chapter 5, “Minding the Gap,” translates the gap between knowing and not knowing, high culture and low, elite and common, into the gaps in information and teasing obfuscations of occasional political satire. Centered on Poems on Affairs of State, Williams describes the formation of a culture of playful interaction between reader and writer in satiric production and consumption. Readers of these satires attempted to unmask the pseudonyms and fill in the blanks in ways her evidence shows were partial, imperfect, and uneven, demonstrating that many readers did not have ready access to the information necessary to solve the mysteries of dashes and allusions and experience the satire fully and correctly: mere existence did not imply omniscience. This point is crucial for Williams, as she argues through a comparison with the Yale edition of Affairs of State, which reveals the answers to the satiric puzzles, that reading the satire as a historical, literary artifact in this way is sharply at odds with the experience of early readers. Moreover, it distorts the genre by removing the possibility of misreading or the anxious delight of hazarding a guess; paradoxically, reading the corrected version of a restoration satire is necessary to read it wrong.

Chapter 6, “The Intimacy of Omission,” examines the various personal uses and readings of textual omission in sociable verse. The centerpiece of the chapter is a retelling of the composition of different editions of Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock through the lens of reader identifications and misidentifications. The poem serves Williams as a representative case of potential readings and usages, ranging from private amusement among a select group of knowing readers to a public puzzle for any reader to solve, rightly or wrongly. Published keys to the poem’s omissions illustrate the momentum of desire to know among the latter group, while revisions to the first edition work to keep the omitted identities unknown. Turning from the public to the private, Williams draws attention to evidence of satiric pieces whose circulation among a select society of readers implies the contrasting pleasures of intimate knowledge. Here, omission is not an act of obfuscation but a tool of inclusion that strengthens group belonging. The hermetic nature of the group knowledge necessarily makes others into outsiders, but the nature of this application, Williams suggests, presumes an absence of outsider interest altogether, with the exception perhaps of modern scholars.

Chapter 7, “Unlocking the Past,” considers public, political satires, and secret histories that depend on suspicion that something is always already hidden: they rely on the unknowing reader’s hunger for forbidden and illicit information. Omission grows from ridicule into a form of disclosure in the secret history that tantalizes readers through the absent presence of information in code. Excerpts from letters seeking and sharing information and published keys that Williams includes depict a capacious enthusiasm for unlocking secrets and reading it right. Yet, with this expanded participation in the public sphere, the presumption of a right reading becomes a risky business for authors. Looking closely at Delarivier Manley’s trial for sedition libel, Williams details the dissonant modes of reading secret histories as the coded dissemination of confidential information and whimsical, fictional entertainment. The status of the satirical mode was on trial along with its representative author. Manley’s trial for political sedition further illustrates a new tension in the relationship between author intention and reader interpretation: Were authors liable for their readers’ impressions of a text? Did the meaning of a text lie in author intention or the reader’s understanding?

In the case of Manley’s trial, the expressed intention of the author wins the day, even if the expression is not necessarily sincere. Chapter 8, “Out of Control,” demonstrates, not without some irony, the power of reader interpretation, even if it is what Williams calls an intentional misunderstanding. As the title implies, this chapter is concerned with the loss of control over reading practices and meaning, particularly on reading satire ironically: whether it means one thing or its direct opposite. Williams concentrates on the fate of Daniel Defoe’s The Shortest-Way and his trio of succession pamphlets as exemplifications of authors’ fragile control over reader interpretations. Williams examines Defoe’s trial for political sedition in 1703 over The Shortest-Way as a case study of interpretive power, with particular emphasis on the expansion of satiric offense from individual libel to the seditious critique of the government as an entity. Drawing together various readings and readers of his satires, she shows the weaponizing potential of misreading and the delicate balance of reader predisposition and interpretation for more earnest wrong readers. In the case of Defoe’s Reasons against the Succession of the House of Hanover, Williams shows, once again, the threat of farcical, unironic reading and the necessity of teaching people, on this occasion the queen, how to read it right.

Defoe’s predicament demonstrates the sober desire of a satirist to avoid confusion among his readers. Contrastingly, chapter 9, “Messing with Readers,” explores Pope’s gleeful and repeated confection of confusion in his Dunciads. Understood as a confection of confusion, the poems serve as a capstone for Williams’s collective arguments concerning Augustan satire’s culture of confusion and misreading. She contends there is no right reading of the Dunciad poems, for they are read right when they are being read wrong; uncertainty is the intended experience. As Williams shows, no less a reader than Jonathan Swift admitted bewilderment when asking Pope for the poem’s key. His impatience to know the answers he could not find indicates what energetic pleasure he took in repeatedly attempting, sometimes successfully, to decode the text. Swift’s befuddled, imperfect reading emphatically dispels illusions of a broadly informed reading culture while also showing the interactive play of satiric obfuscation. A range of early readings of the texts illustrated in keys, private correspondence, and annotated editions shows readers struggling to make meaning and identify the butts of Pope’s jokes. However, as Williams shows, Pope’s grander joke was on his readers. Referents would change or disappear in successive editions. At the same time, new mysteries were posed, including ciphers that referred to no one, so that in seeking the right referent, they were always wrong. Or were they? Were readers in on the joke? Regardless, Williams closes her engagement with Pope to reassert that scholarly approaches vested in expertise miss the mark: the joke of reading right is still in play, and Pope is having the last laugh.

In the closing arguments of her “Afterwards,” Williams returns to the present readers she addresses in her first chapter and reflects on her misreadings as a pedagogue of satire. However, her mea culpa of expertise leads the reader to wonder what balance she recommends between the expertise necessary to access the satirical world of the Augustans and what should be left for students to misread. More broadly, her treatment of this debate asks a more fundamental question: What does it mean to understand a text? She proposes that this question is as relevant for today’s classrooms as it is for scholarship of our period. But she argues that the significance of this history extends beyond syllabuses and academic debate, providing a valuable lens for understanding our current predica- ment as readers. In the digital world, authorial control of meaning and meaning-making is slippery at best. Digital parallels run throughout Williams’s arguments, aligning the analogous experiences of confusion, obfuscation, wrong readings, and deliberate misreadings that reassuringly normalize “reading it wrong” without valorizing or denouncing it. Yet the analogies also foretell the dangerous possibilities of thinking that we are reading it right.

Melanie Holm is a Professor of English at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She is currently writing a book entitled “The Skeptical Imagination: Gender, Genre, and Sociability in Eighteenth-Century Literature.”

Lesage ou l’invention comique, dir. Christelle Bahier-Porte et Christophe Martin. Sorbonne Université Presses, 2023. 358p. 22€. ISBN 979-1023107579.

Critique littéraire par Hélène Cussac, Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, France

La fin du XXe siècle et les vingt premières années du XXIe ont assisté à une régularité des travaux scientifiques sur l’œuvre d’Alain-René Lesage. Le colloque en 1995 de Sarzeau, commune du Morbilhan en Bretagne où le romancier et dramaturge vit le jour en 1668, se montra en ce sens pionnier—même si on doit à Roger Laufer dès 1971 l’essai bien connu au titre de Lesage ou le métier de romancier—et l’inscription des six premiers livres de Gil Blas de Santillane (1715) au programme de l’Agrégation de Lettres modernes en 2003 entraîna leur multiplication. 2017 fut en outre l’année où parut chez Honoré Champion le tome 12 et dernier de l’édition des Œuvres complètes sous la direction de Pierre Brunel et Christelle Bahier- Porte. Cette dernière éditait par ailleurs en 2012 un volume collectif de dix contributions sur des titres moins connus de cet auteur prolixe ((Re) lire Lesage. Presses universitaires de Saint-Étienne) et envisageait dans son introduction des perspectives, dont ce nouveau volume collectif fait partie, en cherchant à reconsidérer « l’invention comique lesagienne, tant romanesque que théâtrale » (introd. C. Bahier-Porte et C. Martin, 7 et 34). Le rire chez Lesage, qui est une caractéristique de sa poétique, a été déjà bien étudié, mais « comprendre les mécanismes de cette “machine” et apprécier à sa juste mesure la place de cet écrivain qui parie sur le comique, au cœur des innovations de son siècle » (34) devenait en effet un enjeu nécessaire. L’introduction, outre de proposer la synthèse des seize chapitres correspondant aux communications données lors du colloque organisé par les deux éditeurs en 2015 à l’Hôtel de Lauzun (IEA-Paris), s’attache ainsi à souligner—excellemment—le travail de l’écrivain dans le contexte littéraire du temps, l’angle choisi de l’invention permettant d’une part de « déterminer ce qui fait sa manière propre et, d’autre part, de réévaluer la place qui lui a été accordée dans l’histoire littéraire » (16). C’est par conséquent à la diversité d’écriture de Lesage que se sont intéressées les douze premières contributions, tout d’abord à la production narrative fictionnelle (1e Partie), pensée comme « Hybrida- tions romanesques », puis à « l’invention dramatique » (2e Partie), avant que ne se préoccupent en troisième partie quatre études sur la réception (« Lesage en héritage »). Même si en ce qui concerne la production romanesque, le volume ne fait pas l’impasse d’études sur les œuvres majeures (Le Diable boiteux et Gil Blas), avec six articles qui leur sont consacrés, on remarque toutefois les approches novatrices sous lesquelles elles sont envisagées, même si, à découvrir l’intention d’A. Gaillard : « Réévaluer le merveilleux du Diable boiteux : savoir et merveille » (41–57), on aurait pu imaginer l’inverse en raison de plusieurs études ayant traité la thématique. Mais « le renouvellement apporté » lui ayant « semblé rester un peu en chemin » (41), A. Gaillard, tout en se demandant « ce que peut le merveilleux pour les savoirs dans le monde de Fontenelle » (42), prolonge et affine la voie empruntée par ses pairs. Observant chez ces derniers « quatre positions qui presque toutes supposent une réduction voire une oblitération du merveilleux » (43), elle observe que dans un début de siècle en cours de démystification, offrant à « la fiction merveilleuse ou fantastique » d’être « un espace privilégié du questionnement et de la reconfiguration des savoirs » (57), le merveilleux du Diable boiteux résiderait dans la dénonciation de l’affabulation : « Le merveilleux savoir de Cléofas, c’est de maintenir ensemble et sans contradiction la possibilité de croire et de ne croire pas » (57). Dans l’esprit de Fontenelle, l’affabulation et la science n’avaient-elle pas même racine ? Néanmoins, malgré son travail métafictionnel, Lesage aime souvent à accentuer l’illusion, non seulement dans Le Diable boiteux mais aussi dans Une journée des Parques. Malgré leurs dates de publication respective éloignées : 1707 puis 1726, dans une édition revue pour le premier ; 1735 pour le second, Floriane Daguisé propose une mise en dialogue de ces deux récits du merveilleux à partir du sens de la vue, tout autant du côté de leur construction que de leur réception. Une analyse précise exprime alors à quel point le regard est « un moteur de la fiction » (73). Du point de vue de la création, ce « regard chimérique—diabolique, rêvé, mythologique—révèle un imaginaire sans bornes » (74) ; quant à la réception, « La curiosité essentiellement visuelle de Cléofas figure l’attention du lecteur et vient légitimer son rapport à la fiction » (76). Cette « Poétique du regard dans la fiction lesagienne » observée par F. Daguisé (59–77) est aussi examinée par F. Gevrey qui porte son attention plus particulièrement, comme l’indique son titre, au sujet de la curiosité (« La curiosité dans Le Diable boiteux et Gil Blas : un enjeu moral et poétique », 79–98). Revoyant « la tradition morale de la mauvaise curiosité » (81), la critique en observe les « mécanismes à l’œuvre » (87). Le theatrum mundi lesagien, « même avec des atténuations ou des retournements ironiques » (ibid.), ne se passe pas de la curiosité telle qu’elle est pensée par les moralistes classiques, illustrant en cela la face sombre de l’humain, mais Lesage ne serait pas novateur s’il n’en découvrait pas l’aspect positif : chez lui, comme l’analyse F. Gevrey, la curiosité est « un véritable art », au point qu’elle est « plus qu’un simple ressort narratif » (98). Ainsi réévaluée en effet, « elle inclut l’intérêt pour une forme de savoir qui porte sur un monde cloisonné et mis à distance » (ibid.). La curiositas semble bien être par conséquent une des caractéristiques qui fonde l’invention romanesque de Lesage dans le sens où celui-ci n’hésite pas à effectuer « un choix d’écriture qu’[il] a emprunté à un nouveau journalisme hybridé de romanesque et qui va bientôt inspirer Montesquieu et Marivaux » (106). Les journalistes ne sont-ils pas, comme les espions, ces êtres davantage curieux que tout un chacun ? Si J.-P. Sermain offre à son tour une relecture de Gil Blas, c’est pour y déceler « une hybridation du roman comique et du journal à l’aube du XVIIIe siècle » (99–110) par le biais d’une contextualisation « qui éclaire le passage de son statut de classique moderne au XVIIIe siècle, inspirateur de grands auteurs, à celui de classique scolaire en manque d’investissements herméneutiques et critiques » (99). L’analyse de ce qui crée aujourd’hui « l’impression d’un monde mécanique sans saveur » permet en fait au critique de mettre en relief les raisons du plaisir à lire Lesage en son temps : « c’était une manière nouvelle de raconter, forgée au début du XVIIIe siècle avec d’autres écrivains majeurs comme Dufresny, Hamilton, Marivaux et Montesquieu. C’était une invention » (102). Rappelant alors les propriétés de l’esthétique journalistique du temps, il souligne l’influence qu’eut la forme neuve du Spectator d’Addison et de Steele, à laquelle n’échappa pas Lesage qui lui-même « innovait en nourrissant une écriture satirique traditionnelle des inventions journalistiques con- temporaines » (109–10). Certes, les écrits de Lesage sont d’inspiration comique, pourtant comme on le sait, le registre tragique affleure parfois, emplit d’autre fois une histoire encadrée. La tragédie serait-elle alors vouée à un traitement parodique, comme se le demande C. Ramond qui examine dans Gil Blas la « voix discordante de l’intertexte tragique » chez ce familier de « l’intertexte ludique » (131–45) ? L’effet dissonant, « dont on peut penser qu’il est recherché dans le cadre d’une esthétique du disparate et du mélange des registres » (133), est en réalité atténué par un certain nombre de procédés que relève l’A. donnant toute sa place fort logiquement à l’épisode du « Mariage de vengeance », histoire sanglante s’il en est. Mais si on peut voir celle-ci comme un extrême de la tragédie, au registre racinien, il faut aussi l’entendre encore comme « une des nuances de la vie humaine, sociale, politique, psychologique et narrative » (145). Dans le projet romanesque de l’écrivain, la tragédie s’intègre davantage dans « un dégradé ou un nuancier qui relève de l’esthétique moderne » (144) : entre l’extrême du « Mariage de vengeance » et celui des récits picaresques, « les histoires romanesques sentimentales du Gil Blas […] atténuent la discordance en présentant un dégradé de registres et de variations sur un thème » (145). Se dessine ainsi « le niveau médian dans lequel le roman va s’installer durablement » (ibid.). Face à la modernité, ou du moins la nouveauté caractérisant Gil Blas, narré dans une forme de petits récits instantanés, S. Waelti (« Lesage/Leibniz ou le roman comme machine à calculer », 111–29) en est arrivé à se demander si « La vraie question [n’était pas] de savoir “comment” il [le narrateur de Gil Blas] est parvenu là où il se trouve au moment où il commence sa rédaction », c’est-à-dire à l’âge adulte, si « une forme d’optimisme », issue des Essais de Théodicée (1700) de Leibniz , ne serait pas à l’œuvre dans le roman et si en fin de compte, « les deux œuvres ne participe[raient] pas de la même conception providentielle de l’univers » (111–12). C’est en effectuant l’analyse de la « sage économie » de Gil Blas, « fondée sur des calculs de risques, sur le développement de la statistique et sur l’usage systématique de registres ou livres de comptes » (112) et en s’appuyant sur le petit texte qui clôt la Théodicée que répond S. Waelti, lequel rencontre, après R. Démoris, une certaine « mauvaise foi », à moins « que ce qui se met en place dans un roman tel que Gil Blas, comme dans la fiction qui clôt la Théodicée, ne soit en réalité, au début du XVIIIe siècle, pas encore pensable sous la forme d’un programme économique » (128).

Il était bel et bien indispensable, s’agissant de l’invention lesagienne, de revisiter avant tout les deux textes de celui qui s’inscrivait dans une veine critique du roman et faisait de son œuvre, aussi théâtrale, un laboratoire expérimental. L’Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane, parcourant en effet « la quasi-totalité des registres romanesques alors disponibles » (introd., 12), est la marque indéniable d’une création particulièrement originale et pré-moderne. C’est par conséquent dans cette direction que des récits moins connus se trouvent observés, tels que le « texte paradoxal, ignoré aujourd’hui » (25) des Nouvelles Aventures de l’admirable Don Quichotte de la Manche (1704), exploré par D. Alvarez Roblin (25– 39). L’A. analyse finement la « recervantisation » à l’œuvre, à l’inverse de la continuation moralisatrice d’Avellaneda, et souligne la dimension métafictionnelle chère à Lesage et particulièrement goûtée aujourd’hui par la critique. L’adaptation de Lesage, qui est aussi son premier roman, se montre ainsi très originale en ce qu’elle offre aux héros cervantins « une expérimentation très libre de la réconciliation entre Avellanada et Cervantès » (38). Moins original sans doute est le roman-mémoires, en vogue dans les années 1730, auquel il s’essaie avec Les Aventures de Beauchêne, qui paraît la même année (1732) que l’adaptation du Guzman d’Alfarache. J. Cormier (« De l’histoire véritable au roman-mémoires », 147–65), qui s’est intéressé à l’ordre de publication des deux textes, donne l’antériorité au second et relève « une souplesse étonnante dans le chef de Lesage », « capable de passer de l’autobiographie picaresque fictive [au] roman de flibustiers » (148), même si Les Aventures de Beauchêne s’annonce comme le récit autobiographique d’un capitaine de flibustiers dans La Nouvelle Orléans, car « rien ne trahit le registre “flibustier” » (154). Observant en outre le travail de re-création habituel à Lesage, mais cette fois-ci à partir « non d’une œuvre littéraire mais d’un témoignage individuel original » (151), le critique s’interroge sur le peu de succès des Aventures : mode de construction éclatée (159) ? Crime et horreur à toutes les pages (d’après H. Coulet, 164) ? Comique devenu déplaisant ? Quoi qu’il en fût, le roman-mémoires reste de fait pour J. Cormier une sorte d’hapax dans le romanesque lesagien (165).

Pour ce qui est de l’invention dramatique—sans omettre que la comédie n’est souvent pas éloignée de son œuvre romanesque—, ce n’est pas Crispin rival de son maître et Turcaret, ces comédies atypiques déjà amplement observées, qui font l’objet des chapitres de la seconde partie, même si elles sont ici ou là référencées. Avec le dramaturge, nous retrouvons non seulement la veine comique qui lui chère, mais aussi « un cousinage parodique revendiqué », celui avec l’opéra, éclairé de manière érudite par J. Le Blanc (169–89). L’adepte du théâtre des foires Saint-Germain et Saint-Laurent dès 1712 cultive en effet « la parodie d’opéra sous toutes ses formes » jusqu’à sa « dernière pièce qu’il offre à l’Opéra-Comique le 6 septembre 1738 » (169). La parodie étant elle- même au fondement de l’Opéra-Comique, Lesage ne pouvait qu’être ravi d’expérimenter de nouvelles formes dramatiques. On lui compterait la rédaction de plus d’une centaine de pièces durant cette période (Introd. 18) ; néanmoins « ce dépistage des parodies dans le répertoire de l’Opéra-Comique de Lesage n’est pas toujours aisé » (170), explique J. Le Blanc avant de révéler le résultat de son enquête, d’analyser le contenu desdites parodies et d’en dégager les liens de filiation entre les Forains et l’Opéra, mais aussi avec l’Académie de musique. Toutes les parodies d’opéra de l’anthologie lesagienne « recèlent en effet des airs d’opéra sous forme de timbres de vaudevilles » (170). Il faut dire aussi que « la parodie d’opéra est une arme de prédilection dans Les Querelles des théâtres » (176) des années 1718–21, aussi Lesage ne se dispense-t-il pas de théâtraliser ces querelles institutionnelles (185). Quelle fut toutefois sa part réelle dans ces œuvres écrites le plus souvent à plusieurs mains ?

J. Le Blanc ainsi que N. Rizzoni (« D’Orneval, l’ombre de Lesage ? », 225–50) s’attachent à cette question, majeure, si l’on s’attache à l’axe de réflexion choisi par les éditeurs de l’ouvrage : l’invention. De ce corpus des parodies d’opéra, Lesage est finalement l’auteur unique d’une vingtaine seulement ; 79 autres seraient le fruit d’une collaboration, affirme J. Le Blanc qui formule l’hypothèse que « l’initiative de ces parodies revien[drait] surtout à Fuzelier et d’Orneval » (186). Ce que confirme N. Rizzoni qui cherche à rendre—à juste titre—la place qu’il mérite à d’Orneval, le co-éditeur de neuf des dix volumes de l’anthologie du Théâtre de la Foire. Les recherches menées conduisent à l’idée que celui-ci fut certainement « le catalyseur indispensable à la triade féconde que Lesage et Fuzelier ont menée avec lui » (234). Si sa veine dramatique fut si peu reconnue, le corpus de ses pièces, examinées par N. Rizzoni, révèle « une véritable altérité par rapport à celle de Lesage et, par conséquent une féconde complémentarité » (248). Y. Mahé s’est alors intéressé à une parodie singulière : les Noces de Proserpine (191–210), en creusant la piste de ce que la critique pense depuis longtemps comme la réécriture de la Proserpine (LWV 58-1680) de Lully et Quinault. En prolongeant les travaux de F. Rubellin face aux trois sources identifiées de cet opéra-comique, Y. Mahé souligne le fait que les parodiques Noces de Proserpine se détournent de leur œuvre-cible, en raison notamment d’un important réseau d’intertextualités (193). N’est-ce pas cependant la destinée de nombre d’hypotextes mis à l’épreuve du palimpseste ? Il s’avère toutefois que les trois réécritures, dont le prétexte n’est aux yeux de Y. Mahé que de faire œuvre critique de l’actualité musicale, expriment un travail particulièrement complexe. Il en résulte ainsi des Noces qui « s’affichent comme une antithèse du modèle lullyste » (201) et qui connurent bien plus de succès que le pré-texte de la Proserpine, signe du changement de goût du public délaissant les opéras-ballets et les grands ballets mythologiques pour la parodie (209). S’il s’agit alors de parodier les grands, notamment le roi, le spectateur de la Foire en général se régale. Pour autant, le sujet le conduit-il vers l’irrespect envers son souverain ? Nous sommes loin encore du temps de la Révolution quand les spectacles mettant en scène le couple royal participeront à sa déchéance. Dans les années 1713 à l’inverse, comme le montre

J.M. Leichman (« À la cour du roi manant, le royalisme paradoxal du Théâtre de la Foire », 211–23) prenant l’exemple d’Arlequin roi de Sérendib, rabaisser la personne sacrée au rang de ses sujets réjouit certes, mais touche ; finalement « rendre le roi familier ne fait que le rehausser dans l’estime des spectateurs » (223). Davantage que de participer au « profond mouvement anti-autoritaire qui mine alors la monarchie française » (citation D. Lurcel, 211), le théâtre forain de Lesage recèlerait, selon le critique, « une idéologie royaliste » (212). Ces quelques travaux de grande qualité laissent à penser que les répertoires des spectacles de la Foire, redécouverts dans les années 1990 (introd., 20), sont encore à explorer et à faire mieux connaître, bien qu’ils aient commencé à trouver leur place dans des mises en scènes de notre contemporanéité. Car que reste-t-il de Lesage, aujourd’hui quasi inconnu hormis des spécialistes, alors qu’au XIXe siècle, son influence était patente chez des écrivains dont les noms résonnent encore (Smollett, Defoe, Goethe …) ?

Espérons donc que l’étude de la réception et de la fortune de l’œuvre entier continuera suite aux contributions données dans ce volume sur l’héritage de Lesage. Ce dernier a-t-il d’ailleurs lui-même légué un quelconque testament intellectuel ? Cela ne fait aucun doute pour P. Pelckmans qui voit dans sa lecture du Livre sixième (Seconde partie) de l’Histoire d’Estévanille Gonzales (1741) « le dernier mot de Lesage romancier » (253–64). Sans grande surprise peut-être, mais ô combien enchanteur est ce mot à trouver, d’après le critique, dans la poétique de l’auteur. Certes, le second Estévanille, d’un écrivain vieillissant, « sacrifie un peu trop souvent à un certain esprit de sérieux sentimental et/ou moralisateur » (260), mais le (re)découvrir dans une perspective poétique présente et synthétise en quelque sorte la philosophie et l’esthétique lesagiennes. L’auteur proclame en effet dans son dernier roman un « élémentaire droit au plaisir et notamment au plaisir du rire » (262). « L’enjouement », quels qu’en soient les registres, est donc le dernier mot—sans doute peut-on y voir une leçon—donné pour une fois « presque en toutes lettres » (263). Les auteurs des suites et continuations l’ont-ils retenu à partir de leur réception de l’œuvre ? Cela ne semble pas être le cas dans la suite d’un auteur anonyme, publiée en français en 1744 et dans une seconde édition en 1754, dont il existe trois éditions anglaises, qu’examine F.B. Assaf (« La Vie de don Alphonse Blas de Lirias : palimpseste et séquelle de Gil Blas », 267–81). N’ayant « rien de picaresque » en effet, la version française « se démarque clairement de l’hypotexte lesagien se donnant comme une suite à un texte virtuel qui n’existe qu’à l’intérieur de l’hypertexte anonyme de 1744 » (271). Gil Blas revêtirait-il donc trop de « fadeur », pour reprendre le jugement d’Anatole France observé par G. Métayer (« Anatole France et Lesage ou la contagion de la fadeur », 283–97), pour que même une continuation ne tienne compte de son esthétique ? L’œuvre critique d’A. France a joué indéniablement dans un premier temps « le rôle de “lieu de mémoire” » (283), explique G. Métayer, interrogeant la place tenue par Lesage dans cette mémoire sélective au vu de l’ampleur des commentaires d’A. France sur des auteurs du XVIIIe siècle (285). Les omissions sont pourtant nombreuses ; Lesage en a été épargné, A. France préfaçant l’édition du Diable boiteux de 1878 (290) à la demande de l’éditeur Lemerre. Las ! Si certains font l’éloge de l’édition, Barbey d’Aurevilly rédige une véritable satire du trop « sage conteur », simple « amuseur » que serait Lesage (cité 293 et 296) et une critique d’A. France trop soumis à la prudence et à l’éducation littéraire (294). Ainsi l’observation de G. Mahé met- elle parfaitement en relief la façon dont se met en place « la machine de l’oubli » : l’esthétique de Lesage était devenue une esthétique de la fadeur (297). La réception est encore celle qui s’effectue à travers les traductions. La fortune tout particulièrement de Gil Blas est explorée attentivement dans une ère géographique et culturelle spécifique : la Hongrie, par M. Orbázi, jusqu’à la date récente de 2011 (299–313). Avant même d’être traduite, une partie de l’œuvre lesagienne figure dans quelques bibliothèques privées, et entre la première traduction de Gil Blas, tardive il est vrai (1875), contrairement au Diable boiteux (1803), et la dernière traduction datant de 1960, le roman picaresque « est toujours resté au centre de la vie littéraire hongroise » (312), les illustrations, dès la première édition, soutenant la faveur du lectorat.

L’œuvre de Lesage charme donc peut-être encore, pense J.-P. Sermain (108). Questions d’époque, de goût, de mode en littérature. Quoi qu’il en soit, l’histoire littéraire ne saurait s’abstraire des recherches sur l’œuvre d’un auteur qui trouva son lectorat et son public à la Foire, et dont les innovations, notamment du côté du comique, marquaient l’entrée du roman dans la modernité, en même temps que celles, toutefois dans un autre registre, de Robert Challe. Ce volume, aux riches études, dont certaines sont accompagnées d’intéressantes gravures, muni aussi d’une belle bibliographie (315–40)—bien que non exhaustive—et d’un index des personnes, est par conséquent bienvenu.

Hélène Cussac est enseignant-chercheur à l’Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, Laboratoire PLH/ELH. Elle vient de co-éditer le tome V (Livre 1 et 2) des Œuvres complètes de Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (éditions Classiques Garnier) et de diriger l’édition du volume « Le paysage sonore dans la littérature d’Ancien Régime », publié dans la revue Topiques en ligne, https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/topiques/2022-v6-topiques07705/.

Corrosive Solace: Affect, Biopolitics, and the Realignment of the Repertoire, 1780–1800 by Daniel O’Quinn. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022. 376pp. $74.95. ISBN 9781512823110.

Review by Julie A. Carlson, University of California, Santa Barbara, United States

Read the title carefully and then take a deep breath. For this book offers a phenomenal look at how a collective, embodied, ephemeral phenomenon like theatre evokes affective experiences that distill and register not simply nascent public feeling but also changes in the stylization and mobilization of feelings that both make and mark epochal shifts in cultural history. It is challenging enough to say what any mind-body is feeling. Describing what an unruly body of late eighteenth-century theatre-goers was sensing and specifying how their disparate reactions informed habits of identity and components of Britain’s cultural patrimony is the accomplishment of Corrosive Solace. The book is minutely specific about the historical events that its examination of London theatre in the 1780s and 90s engages, and it is transhistorical, certainly in method but also in delineating an affective economy that underlies and to a degree still characterizes the workings of performance culture today.

These sentences warrant unpacking, and I do my best here to unfold Daniel O’Quinn’s claims. But I first want to register my astonishment at his ability to offer such a consequential account of such evanescing materials. For the central “archive” on which his account draws is “the repertoire” as Tracy Davis and Diana Taylor have delineated it, which means that the primary materials he works with are products and operations of memory. This keeps the book two stages removed from published play texts, which readings of this period of theatre generally prioritize. Put a different way, the aim of Corrosive Solace is to bring current readers as close as possible to the cognitive as well as physical conditions of British theatre viewers in the 1780s and 90s. Their perceptions of the action occurring on stage were not only shaped by memories of past performances but are also crucial to evoking and subsequently identifying collectively emerging inchoate feeling states. Because these playgoers arrived at any new performance of a standard play well-versed in its textual and performance highpoints, their mind-bodies were captured and disturbed by what differentiated Sarah Siddons’s Isabella or Lady Macbeth from that of Hannah Pritchard’s, or how Dorothy Jordan’s domestication of “elegant lady” parts was, and made, a travesty of Frances Abington’s (139). They even measured John Philip Kemble’s increasing departures from republicanism by virtue of witnessing his Coriolanus of 1789 and of 1811. These nuances and structures of attention were put into words and into public circulation by press reporting of performers’ enactments and playgoers’ receptiveness to them. Even the page format of press coverage illustrated its crucial mediating function in aligning topical debates in politics and theatre and interpreting one in relation to the other.

The first half of Corrosive Solace focuses on the period spanning the Peace of Paris in 1783 to the advent of the Regency Crisis in 1788 and thus concerns the crisis in British confidence occasioned by the loss of the American colonies and attendant threats to sovereignty at the end of the first British empire. O’Quinn argues that this historical crisis and the mechanisms through which British leaders and publics dealt with it have been under-explored because they have been eclipsed by the impact of the French Revolution and its sway over Romantic-era scholarship. Corrosive Solace deems this a major missed opportunity. For careful attention to this theatre’s modes of managing that crisis displays the effectivity of group affect and the emergence of affective manoeuvres still operative in current body politics and still perpetuating crises. This revisioning reveals a twofold claim: “What we see as inherently Romantic is better understood as post-American,” from which disturbed perspective we are better able to see that “women in many ways saved British culture” (25, 26). How women did so is through the “corrosive solace” that performances in the 1780s provided: a “form of consolation that slowly scours away social and political dispositions” that no longer suited this affective military defeat and that, in scouring while consoling, maintained by slowly altering the functioning of familiar forms (25). Effecting this adjustment was what Sarah Siddons and Dorothy Jordan did in their re-enactments of she- tragedies, post-Restoration drama, and Shakespeare. They sustained the cultural patrimony while ridding it of largely aristocratic governmentalities via gestural and generic innovations that, in their processing by audiences and press commentary, gradually shifted class values and their inhering associations toward the mixed, the female, the middling; in effect, transmitting passivity in and as activity. This process did little to upend social hierarchies and privileges, but it multiplied aspirants and pathways to them so long as they were identifiably white. In this regard, corrosive solace was the “precursor” to cruel optimism, and Corrosive Solace is a significant tribute to literary critic and cultural theorist Lauren Berlant (48). A radical channelling, it specifies the preconditions and potential escape routes from the cruelties enjoined by attachments to governing fantasies and phantasies.

The latter impulse explains why Corrosive Solace favours disruption and realignment over consolidation, for this is how memory and the repertoire operate. The disturbances endemic to both processes establish continuity and potentially activate unmaterialized but already visualized realities via the feedback circuits that comprise “repertoire thinking” (27). Corrosive Solace organizes itself around this dynamic in two senses. The 1790s repertoire, which the second half of the book considers, portrays challenges and alternatives to the gendered and racialized norms that the sublimely middling performances of the mid-80s install. Chapters 5 and 6 focus on new plays (by Elizabeth Inchbald, Richard Cumberland, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan) that nonetheless depended on repertoire thinking to make visible the alternate routes that their challenges to biopower represent. The spectacular collapsing bridge in Sheridan’s historical tragedy Pizarro (1799), which threatens an interracial infant and infancy, signals the yet incomprehensible way forward and the temporarily foreclosed but also reactivatable possibilities residing in Rolla’s reprieve of Sheridan’s cosmopolitan imagining of imperial leadership in his speeches denouncing Warren Hastings (302–4, 275–79). Similarly, apprehending fissures in middling sociability epitomized by Inchbald’s Mr Harmony relies on perceiving how generically disturbing it was to cast Kemble as the recluse Roderick Penruddock, Siddons as the adulteress Mrs Haller, or Jordan as the “much suffering Peruvian mother” Cora (279).

The second sense in which the book organizes itself around disruption is by organizing its readers into repertoire thinkers. In terms of theatre history, the performance and analytic time of Corrosive Solace has passed. It went with the lifting of the monopoly on London patent houses and the end of a delimited “media scale” that could render an “event loop” intelligible (17–18). But what the book helps us to see is the futurity peculiarly cognized through the present-time that performance culture and repertoire thinking conjures. Like the default mode network in the brain, this visualization ties memory to prospection, privileges associational cortices, and “knows” them to be highly contextual. By default, we might say, any present-time of performance is systemically bifurcated and blurred, requiring representation to proffer a sense of what is happening while always retaining the shared sense that, in moments of crisis, something incomprehensible is happening and, thanks to repertoire thinking, happening differently right before our eyes. Neither progress nor discernible improvement, such happening is not nothing. Nor is its provocation ever fully effaced or, for that matter, fully faced. Plus, its efficacy does not pertain to the individual or rest on whether any specific person actually saw or felt what the book is describing. O’Quinn’s playgoers are a collective amalgam of happening-seekers whose perceptions evoke affective memories that are visceral, situational, and transferable because also textual, pictorial, and part of public record. In restoring them to us, O’Quinn draws generously on the scholarly record, acknowledging the many who have positioned him to see what Corrosive Solace in turn establishes as grounds for improvisation. His is the best account I have read of how performance culture sees people through crises both then and now.

Julie A. Carlson is Professor of English and Associate Dean of Faculty Equity in the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has written on theatre culture, social justice activism, and radical friendships in the British Romantic era.

Orienting Virtue: Civic Identity and Orientalism in Britain’s Global Eighteenth Century by Bethany Williamson. University of Virginia Press, 2022. 248pp. $35. ISBN 978-0813947617.

Review by Sonja Lawrenson, Manchester Metropolitan University, United Kingdom

In this admirable and ambitious study of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature, Bethany Williamson offers a fresh account of the role of virtue in shaping the interrelated discourses of English nationhood and British imperialism during this formative historical period. Arguing that the ubiquity of the term “virtue” in the long eigh- teenth century has resulted in a certain critical complacency regarding its meaning, Williamson contends virtue was a multifaceted concept that comprehended a range of shifting valences. In the wake of two centuries of constitutional upheaval, Enlightenment England negotiated new political, philosophical, and gendered conceptions of virtue that drew on older teleological and moral understandings while simultane- ously addressing contemporary anxieties regarding Britain’s civic identity. According to Williamson, eighteenth-century understandings of virtue evolved as much out of conduct-book treatises on female chastity and Machiavellian theories of political virtù as Aristotelian, Stoic, and Christian ideals. While not always compatible, these various approaches to virtue were repeatedly amalgamated and conflated within English literary representations of civic identity. And yet, with its promise of opportunities for global commerce and conquest, Britain’s burgeoning empire undermined any attempt to determine an absolute concept of moral value. Across the long eighteenth century, English literature evidences the ongoing struggle to reconcile England’s claims to virtue with its imperial ambitions.

Williamson crucially emphasizes the tenuity and vulnerability of Britain’s empire during the early eighteenth century. With China and other Asian empires dominating a well-established global economy, imperial glory for Britain was more often a projection than a reality. Within this context, virtue is not simply considered as a moral quality that exists prior to action but becomes a material quality that acts to validate its own superiority. Virtue claims thus served as an “epistemological framework, letting writers with diverse politico-economic aims imagine a future in which England’s moral and material worth remains intact despite evidence of weakness or corruption” (1). Literary narratives provided authors with the opportunity to deploy or interrogate such virtue claims as a means “to orient their readers both chronologically and geographically” (2). By offering comparisons between national virtues in the East and West, as well as the past and present, literature of the long eighteenth century reinforced a belief in England’s distinctive political virtue—a virtue that, if not actualized in the present, always had the potential to be realized in the future. For this reason, Williamson argues that eighteenth-century narratives of English greatness are not founded upon a sense of innate morality but rather upon unstable assumptions regarding cultural differences. Her goal, in Orienting Virtue, is “to consider how virtue, comes to stand, metonymically, for an English narrative of past, present, and future greatness that is predicated on virtuous difference from other nations’ peoples and pasts” (2).

To do so, Williamson offers a series of literary analyses of texts written during periods of political or cultural disaffection across the long eighteenth century, from the decades following the English Civil Wars to the revolutionary controversy of 1790s Britain. Centering on a discussion of Henry Neville’s Isle of Pines (1668), chapter 1 outlines the ways in which this late seventeenth-century text manifests the deep-seated conflict underlying the longer period’s representation of English political virtue. By contextualizing Neville’s satirical pamphlet fiction in relation to both the political works of other English republicans and the early modern trade networks of its Indian ocean setting, this chapter reveals the ways in which Neville’s narrative endeavours to maintain a republican vision of English liberty while displacing anxieties regarding transatlantic slavery onto England’s Dutch rivals. Chapter 2 focuses on John Dryden’s celebrated tragedy Aureng-Zebe (1675) and its complex portrayal of heroic virtue under duress. Drawing attention to Dryden’s dedication to the play and its image of a Dutch vessel “striking sail” (that is, submitting) to an English one as a means of concealing an imminent assault, this chapter commences with a discussion of the political implications of this nautical analogy, particularly as it pertains to the treachery and deceitfulness of Charles II’s court in the prelude to the succession crisis. Williamson then argues that this nautical analogy also gestures toward Aureng-Zebe’s broader concerns regarding the gap between the innate principles and the external semblance of national virtue. Just as the dedication’s image of maritime conflict emphasizes the situationality of naval weakness, Dryden exploits his play’s Mughal setting to dramatize the conflict between an idealized heroic virtue and Machiavellian political pragmatism to put forward a “pragmatic virtue” that synthesizes elements of both.

Continuing the nautical theme, chapter 3 revisits the final two books of Gulliver’s Travels (1726) to consider its representation of Japan in the aftermath of the South Sea Bubble of 1720, particularly Robert Walpole’s ensuing rise in government. Reading Swift’s most famous and enduring fiction alongside his lesser-known and unfinished Account of the Court and Empire of Japan (1808) and Alexander Pope’s Windsor-Forest (1713), this chapter underscores Swift’s debt to an earlier republican model of English virtue, despite his general antipathy toward its political legacy. Although Swift excoriates the imperial ambitions and appetite of contemporaries such as Daniel Defoe, his commitment to Protestant liberties in both Britain and Ireland aligns him with this tradition. Comparing his descriptions of the contemporaneous empires of Japan and China with his reflections on the histories of Sparta, Athens, and Rome, the chapter identifies Houyhnhnmland as Swift’s attempt to explore the virtue claims of both past and present civilizations and thereby expose the elusiveness and polyvalence of all virtue claims. The chapter concludes, nevertheless, that Swift’s Protestant worldview is maintained via this “past-future vision” as it renders possible a future in which English virtue is revitalized (119). The subsequent two chapters disrupt the chronological sequence of the previous argument to focus on women’s responses to gendered discourses of virtue across the century. Chapter 4 draws on a diverse and intriguing array of female-authored texts, including Mary Pix’s Ibrahim (1696), Jemima Kindersley’s Letters (1777), Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752), and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). The chapter delineates how these writers deploy different facets of feminist orientalism to interrogate the symbolic significance of female chastity in political discourses surrounding virtue. While writers such as Pix, Kindersley, and Lennox draw on chivalric romance and the trope of the seraglio to validate women’s contribution to national virtue, Wollstonecraft refutes the claims of romance in her stereotypical depiction of Oriental despotism. Chapter 5 compares Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1759) with Ellis Cornelia Knight’s sequel, Dinarbas (1790), to demonstrate the interplay of competing models of virtue as moral ideal or material action in the second half of the eighteenth century. Noting that the rhetoric of civic virtue develops alongside Britain’s imperial wealth, this chapter argues that these pseudo-oriental tales reflect ongoing anxieties regarding imperial consumption and its impact on national virtue. Both tales engage cosmopolitan civics as a means to explore the conflict between universal ideals and local duties. Whereas Johnson’s Rasselas foregrounds this conflict as a tension between “virtue-as-ideal” and “virtue-as-action,” Knight’s Dinarbas seeks to reconcile both in the concept of a globally oriented “virtuous duty.” And yet, like earlier literary efforts to “orient virtue,” Knight’s text is unable to transcend its Eurocentric worldview and therefore struggles to envision a genuinely civic cosmopolitanism. English political virtue and its concomitant, national greatness are once again deferred.

Overall, Orienting Virtue offers an insightful and compelling thesis regarding the dual evolution of the concepts of virtue and empire in the long eighteenth century. Williamson cogently articulates her research’s significance and import in relation to both the Saidian school of Orientalism and Srinivas Aravamudan’s delineation of Enlightenment Orientalism (2011). Like other recent scholarly monographs in this field, Williamson omits to mention Alain Grosrichard’s Structure du sérail (1979; rep. in English as The Sultan’s Court 1998)—an equally important if not equally influential work, which similarly examines the role of orientalist fictions in constructing European ideals of liberty and virtue. Nonetheless, Williamson’s eclectic yet astute selection of texts enables her to trace some interesting and, at times, surprising thematic continuities and discursive transitions across the longue durée. This, in turn, provides opportunities for some original and engaging close readings of familiar texts. On the rare occasion, textual analysis becomes slightly stretched to accommodate the book’s overarching thesis. For example, I would query the argument “that Gulliver maintains his identity and his sanity” through the “crucial cyclicality of the Travels” (125). Nor I am convinced that Swift would assign his satirical mouthpiece the task to “recoup virtue” (126). Such an interpretation may correspond neatly with Swift’s Protestant model of virtue, but it underestimates the slipperiness of his satire. Likewise, the complexity of specific authors’ theological positions (for example, Swift, Pope, and Dryden) is sometimes obscured in the book’s broader efforts to delineate imperialism’s role in establishing and securing a Protestant worldview. Yet, these are minor quibbles with a work that contributes so richly and eloquently to our understanding of eighteenth-century civic discourses, both domestic and imperial.

Sonja Lawrenson is Senior Lecturer in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. Her research centres on women’s writing in eighteenth-century and Romantic Ireland, and more broadly on Irish transnationalism, eighteenth-century imperialism, Enlightenment and Romantic orientalisms, and eighteenth-century Irish theatre and print culture.

Regenerating Romanticism: Botany, Sensibility, and Originality in British Literature, 1750–1830 by Melissa Bailes. University of Virginia Press, 2023. 282pp. $32.50. ISBN 978-0813949413.

Review by Claire Knowles, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia

This fascinating study explores the melding of the discourses of science and sensibility in the Romantic era. Melissa Bailes examines a wide range of authors, offering lively readings of works that will be familiar to readers (for example, William Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads; James Thomson’s The Seasons) alongside those of less well-known writers, often women. Her definition of what constitutes “scientific literature” is capacious, encompassing such diverse genres as “poetry, novels, travel writing, children’s literature, and even literary criticism” (2). Regenerating Romanticism challenges one of the most commonly held misconceptions about the writing of the era—that the discourse of science became detached from sensibility and notions of originality over the course of the Romantic period. Moreover, and as in her previous book, Questioning Nature: Women’s Scientific Writing and Literary Originality, 1750–1830, Bailes places women writers at the centre of her study, suggesting that this movement against sensibility in the science writing of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was part of a broader social movement that worked to dismiss the contributions of women writers to literary and scientific culture more generally. In this respect, and in many others, Regenerating Romanticism has much to offer anyone interested in the history and recuperation of women’s writing in the Romantic period as well as those interested in the interrelation of science and literature during this time of experimentation and expansion in scientific discourse.

The central argument is that Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802) played an influential role in distinguishing “the Poet from the ‘Man of science’” (4) and that this distinction popularized a notion that the discourse of science was antithetical to the most highly valued Romantic qualities: sensibility and originality. Wordsworth’s manoeuvre was based, Bailes argues, on a misreading of Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden (1789–91). Bailes notes that Darwin’s focus on ideas of novelty in his poem, combined with an overt interest in the sexual lives of plants, “allowed some contemporary critics and writers to deem his work as insignificant and short lived” (17). This critical dismissal of one of the most important works of eighteenth-century scientific poetry would have ramifications for those later writers—such as, for example, Charlotte Smith—whose own literary works were deeply intertwined with the scientific developments of the period.

As I have already suggested, the great strength of this book is its account of the significance of women’s scientific writing during this period. Chapter 5, one of the strongest, focuses on Charlotte Smith’s response to Darwin’s poetry in her poem “Flora,” from her children’s book Conversations Introducing Poetry: Chiefly on Subjects of Natural History (1804). The very title of this book, of course, reflects Smith’s idea that science is, and should be, an essential topic for poetry, particularly poetry designed to educate young minds. As Bailes describes it, Smith presents herself in “Flora” “as a new kind of ‘moralizing’ poet of sensibility” (136), and Bailes’s account of the way in which the poet deploys the discourse of sensibility, scientific discovery, and careful observation in her poetry offers new insights into Smith’s poetics. Similarly intriguing is Bailes’s account, in chapter 4, of the association between people, flowers, and vegetables in Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl (1806). Drawing on an association between cannibalism and colonization, Bailes argues that throughout Owenson’s novel the Irish peasantry are associated with the type of vegetation grown in Ireland; the Irish potato, in particular, is depicted as a vegetable that is always in danger of being devoured by the rapacious English. This is a highly original line of argument, and Bailes’s astute reading of Owenson’s novel does much to uncover the complexity of this portrayal of the Irish landscape, vegetation, and culture.

This connection between colonization, empire, and sensibility is also at the heart of Bailes’s chapter on travel writer and poet Maria Riddell’s Voyages to the Madeira, and Leeward Caribbean Isles (1792, 1802). Bailes argues that Riddell, a comparatively less well-studied writer who had strong connections to the West Indies, depicts the islands as a “space of improvement and knowledge-making” rather than “a site of biological and social degeneration” (30). This places Riddell in opposition to other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers on colonization whose depic- tions of plant reproduction during this time “indicate a deeper fear of the chaotic potential of hybridity through sexual reproduction” (94)—a fear that could be easily extended to humans and their reproduction. Bailes finishes this chapter with an account of Riddell’s collection Metrical Miscellany (1802), a volume that brings together a wide range of poets— from Henrietta O’Neill to the Duchess of Devonshire—whose emphasis on sensibility, and often botany, demonstrates the unproductiveness of separating these two discourses at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Bailes’s book reminds us that it is impossible to understand culture in the long eighteenth century without grasping the pervasive influence of sensibility upon nearly every facet of life during this period. Sensibility indelibly shaped eighteenth-century conceptions of gender; it altered the way in which relationships between British and non-British people were framed; it became a hallmark of the poetry and prose of the period; and it gave impetus to the abolitionist movement and other social reform movements. It is no wonder that, as Bailes suggests in Regenerating Romanticism, sensibility played a significant role in the conceptualization and framing of the scientific literature of the period.

Claire Knowles is the Head of the Department of Languages and Cultures and an Associate Professor in English at La Trobe University, Australia. She has published extensively on the women writers of the Romantic era, and her most recent book is Della Cruscan Poetry, Women and the Fashionable Newspaper (2023).

The Queerness of Water: Troubled Ecologies in the Eighteenth Century by Jeremy Chow. University of Virginia Press, 2023. 254pp. $29.50. ISBN 978-0813949512.

Review by Shelby Johnson, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, United States

Jeremy Chow’s book considers canonical texts of the long eighteenth century for their fraught representations of colonial masculinity and subjugated lands, as scholars familiar with this literary archive may no doubt recognize in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), William Beckford’s Vathek (1782), Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Yet Chow adds that these texts significantly take up questions of masculinity in scenes where characters encounter or are endangered by bodies of water. As he reminds us, Crusoe struggles to survive a hurricane, while Dr Frankenstein and his Creation challenge each other across icy glaciers— all moments that place the novels’ iterations of masculine subjectivity at risk of death, violation, and loss. To engage with these scenes, Chow brilliantly deploys methods in blue humanities to query how depictions of water create moments of drag, where aquatic waves and movements impede the unfolding of colonial subjectivity and thereby gesture toward queer and decolonial possibilities: “To recognize water’s queerness is to pay homage to how representations and embodiments of queerness resist stasis, reject ontological stability, embolden fluid becomings, and seep into, through, and beyond commitments to heteronormativity” (8). By pressing on moments where colonial masculinity threatens to come undone, Chow shows how water assembles and animates alternatives to a colonial politics of extraction over global peoples of colour and non/ human environments.

In this way, Chow improvises a mode of reading canonical texts for how aqueous intimacies dissent from colonialism itself. This imperative necessitates a praxis attentive to local settings, and Chow moves away from dominant scholarly preoccupations with oceans to point out that eighteenth-century encounters with water included a variety of environmental forms and physical states, including streams and ponds, shorelines and shoals, storms and fog, ocean currents, and icy glaciers. In addition, he intervenes within and extends methods in environmental humanities by contending that eighteenth-century depictions of water encompass encounters with not only actual environments, but also invented settings, such as the “Island of Despair” in Robinson Crusoe, as Chow considers in his first chapter, “Taken by Storm.” He argues that Crusoe’s experiences with sea storms are not moments that index his exceptionality as a survivor of environmental disaster—representative of an exceptional masculinity—but rather the ocean as a site of distributed and non-sovereign agency. For this point, Chow draws on Bruno Latour’s notion of fluid agency, or processes where colonized human and non/ human subjects who “have also lost their autonomy” nonetheless impede or distort the imposition of imperial sovereignty (Latour, quoted in Chow, 44). Read this way, Crusoe “remains affixed to the sea’s ability and willingness to release him, rather than any semblance of self-governing autonomy that he ultimately fails to achieve,” a point that enables Chow to incisively subvert Crusoe’s pretensions to colonial mastery and autarchic masculinity (48).

For Chow, tracking Crusoe’s contingent agency, which is powerfully delimited by the sea, also opens possibilities for reading against the character’s “violent relationality” with Indigenous subjects in the novel, including his enslaved captive Friday, who carries his own resistant knowledge of the sea. Indeed, Crusoe exemplifies intense anxiety over Indigenous abilities to navigate shorelines, tides, and waves, which contrast with his own failures in navigational acumen (52). To render these alternative knowledge-ways visible, Chow turns to Karin Amimoto Ingersoll’s notion of a “seascape epistemology,” an experiential and generational way of knowing environments and histories that is coextensive with local sites (Ingersoll, quoted in Chow, 53). As Chow acknowledges: “I see the framework of a seascape epistemology that honors modes of indigeneity” violently recast by Crusoe, where “the types of seascape epistemologies that Ingersoll contends stems from Indigenous and Native modes of performance and experience are precisely the modes of alternative knowledge that ail Crusoe” (53). Although I occasionally wished for more direct engagement with eighteenth-century writers’ complicity in slavery and colonial ventures (such as Beckford’s and Lewis’s possession of Caribbean plantations) in The Queerness of Water, I have lingered with Chow’s trenchant reading of Robinson Crusoe because of the novel’s hypervisibility in eighteenth-century literary studies—and because he suggests possibilities for summoning traces of Indigenous aquatic knowledge that exceed the parameters of Defoe’s (and Crusoe’s) colonialist vision.

To that end, Chow not only grapples with aqueous encounters in eighteenth-century archives, but he also builds from them to develop transhistorical methods for engaging with the ongoing legacies of colonial environmental extraction and heteronormativity. In compelling intermezzos between each chapter, he offers innovative readings of contemporary media, which refract the colonialist and heteronormative horizons of canonical eighteenth-century novels. He takes up, among others, Pierre Boulle’s novel Le Planète des Singes (1963) and its reimaginings in The Planet of the Apes film franchise, Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Little Mermaid” and its retellings, and Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin (1997), before concluding with Ben Winters’s Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters (2009), an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811), alongside Guillermo del Toro’s film The Shape of Water (2015). My favourite intermezzo, “Teaching Wreckage in Rising Waters,” is the first. There, Chow describes his students’ responses to Adrienne Rich’s collection of poetry Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971– 1972, outside along the polluted and rising waters of the Susquehanna River near Bucknell University. As he recalls, “To read Rich upon the Susquehanna River’s rising waters is … to hear our voices beside the polluted waters of a river that threatens us. But as my students and I learn alongside the Susquehanna’s accretionary water levels, the queer aqueous futurity of Rich’s poem lies in the rich possibility of approaching our own interconnected nonhumanity” (59).

Near the conclusion of the poem “Diving into the Wreck,” Rich extends an invitation to inhabit a queerly non-sovereign non-subjectivity: “We are, I am, you are / by cowardice or courage / the one who find our way / back to this scene,” where we are called to carry “a book of myths / in which / our names do not appear”—an invitation, as Chow puts it, to recognize how extractive systems have produced the wreckage through which we move and “to realize new genres of being and relationality” in a future we might collaboratively call into being (65–66). Chow’s call to “welcome our queer becomings in troubled waters” is particularly trenchant in an era defined by accelerating climate change and weather precarity, driven by the imperatives of late capitalism and settler colonialism (185). Chow thus models a deeply ethical critical praxis by making visible why studying eighteenth-century literary archives—and how their depictions of queer becomings with water exceed the texts’ colonialist frames— matters today.

Shelby Johnson is an Assistant Professor of early American literature at Oklahoma State University, where she researches and teaches courses that take up the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and ecology in the colonial period. Her book, The Rich Earth between Us: The Intimate Grounds of Race and Sexuality in the Atlantic World, was published in 2024.

Literature and the Arts: Interdisciplinary Essays in Memory of James Anderson Winn, ed. Anna Battigelli. University of Delaware Press, 2023. 244pp. $42.95. ISBN 978-1644533116.

Review by Alison Conway, University of British Columbia, Okanagan, Canada

In 1991, I put together a list of readings in eighteenth-century art criticism as one field of my PhD qualifying exams to support an emergent dissertation project on portraiture and the novel. My ability to formulate this project—and to muster up the courage to ask a leading historian of art, Michael Baxandall, to help me prepare the groundwork for it—was a result of a longstanding tradition of interdisciplinary work in eighteenth- century studies. Literature and the Arts: Interdisciplinary Essays in Memory of James Anderson Winn honours one of the most important figures in this tradition. As Anna Battigelli observes in her excellent introduction, James Winn’s scholarship challenged text-bound practices of literary criticism, advancing in their place the study of different media and of the practices of apprenticeship, performance, and collaboration that supported their development over the course of the long eighteenth century.

No doubt Winn’s own performances (he was an accomplished flutist) provided him with habits of mind conducive to tracing the eighteenth century’s fluid movements between the spaces of writing, music, theatre, dance, and the visual arts. Winn’s work, Battigelli notes, not only weaves a rich tapestry of the eighteenth century’s cultural history, but also shapes new ways of understanding its politics and social transformations. So, for example, Winn’s 2014 study, Queen Anne: Patroness of the Arts, moves from the significance of the queen’s singing voice to her strategic deployment of the arts to celebrate Britain’s victory at the Battle of Blenheim in 1704 to forge a new national self-consciousness.

Not all of the work contained in this volume meets the expectations raised by the subtitle “Interdisciplinary Essays.” Some contributions inhabit, rather, the category of festschrift. Essays on John Dryden’s literary satire by Steven N. Zwicker and Paul Hammond pay homage to Winn’s sense of Dryden as the touchstone of Restoration aesthetics. Cedric D. Reverend’s essay on Domenico Scarlatti takes up Winn’s interest in music history and performance. Peter Sabor’s analysis of Emma’s critical reception in 1816 honours Winn’s deep understanding of how the emergence of new civic and commercial practices in England over the course of the long eighteenth century shaped the nation’s interpretive modes and tastes.

The remaining essays take up the challenges and opportunities afforded by interdisciplinary work. David Hopkins provides a snapshot of thirty years in the life of William Blathwayt’s Baroque country house, Dyrham Park, where music and literature sustained a range of political and cultural investments. Two essays on Restoration drama attend to the intermedial qualities of stage performance. Andrew R. Walkling traces how the magical thinking at work in Dryden’s Albion and Albanius found expression in the play’s 1685 Dorset Garden production, where a celestial phenomenon of three suns surrounded by rainbows, recorded by Captain Christopher Gunman at Calais, was transformed into a theatrical spectacle. One man’s sense of wonder becomes part of Dryden’s “stupendous vision of epochal historical change” in the play’s staging (82). In “Staging Davenant; or Macbeth, the Musical,” Amanda Eubanks Winkler recounts the story of her time as a consultant for a 2018 production of William Davenant’s 1664 adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth at the Folger Theatre in Washington, DC. The play’s director, Robert Richmond, decided to use Bedlam as the setting and then had to navigate the tension that appeared between the “happy” music of the witches’ songs and the dark vision of the madhouse. Winkler’s attentive analysis of the performance’s metamorphosis in the weeks leading up to opening night shows how Davenant’s play came to feel, in the words of one critic, “modern and alive” in the twenty-first century (42).

Paula Backscheider’s essay reminds us what feminist theory has brought to eighteenth-century interdisciplinary studies—a perspective and methodology that broadens our understanding of who and what shape historical and aesthetic transformations. “Queen Anne’s Other Women” revises military history and its masculinist imperatives to fore- ground the contributions women made as washers, nurses, foragers, gun monkeys, sex workers, and funeral directors in Queen Anne’s most significant campaigns. Backscheider analyzes Charles Shadwell’s Humour of the Army and Fair Quaker of Deal, or the Humours of the Navy, and George Farquhar’s Beaux Stratagem and The Recruiting Officer to trace the imbrication of military and theatrical worlds in the early eighteenth century. Backscheider deftly integrates a study of the young Anne’s theatrical performances at court and their role in shaping the monarch’s vision of the nation into her cultural and military history, underscoring the importance of reading “high” and “low” alongside one another when describing the making of modernity.

Ellen T. Harris’s essay, “Anne Donnellan: Friend of the Arts,” takes up Winn’s interest in tracing Restoration and eighteenth-century artist networks. Harris’s captivating account of Anne Donnellan’s life and artistic commitments describes a form of art patronage grounded not in wealth but in friendship: “All who knew Donnellan seemed to have highly valued her character and her mind” (173). Harris shows what happened to a woman who declined to increase her family’s fortunes by marrying well and provides a close reading of Donnellan’s financial records to trace how a femme sole went about setting up her home as a cultural hub. Donnellan’s harpsichord, whose purchase Harris describes, served as a musical anchor to a circle of friends that included writers and painters, such as Elizabeth Montagu and Mary Delaney. Through the women’s correspondence we gain an illuminating history of the period’s art and literary criticism, as well as friendships sustained between the women and Handel, Richardson, Swift, among others. Harris concludes her essay with a reading of Donnellan’s will, noting what the collection of paintings listed there reveals about her aesthetic taste and, intriguingly, her politics. The volume’s concluding essay reveals interdisciplinary work’s most radical element. In a brilliant analysis of twentieth-century artist Elizabeth Rivers, Melissa Schoenberger brings two moments and two media into deep engagement. Out of Bedlam: XXVII Wood Engravings by Elizabeth Rivers with texts from Christopher Smart, published in 1956, documents the moment when Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno first came into public view—1939, just in time to provide commentary on Europe’s unfolding disaster. Rivers produced a series of engravings over the years 1939–45 and Smart’s poetry provided a way for her to assemble her images into a narrative responsive to its moment. Schoenberger shows how Rivers and Smart together make sense of personal and political trauma. Rivers, she points out, chose only to use the “For …” sections of Jubilate Agno, statements “more amenable to reordering and transplantation” (206). Rivers’s images, set above the “For” statements, encourage a recursive mode of reading and looking. We look at the image, read the Smart text below, then move back up to the image to see how it illustrates the text or frames a question that the poetry answers. Neither image nor text stand alone. Nor do they settle into a stable interpretive relation with each other, but rather unsettle boundaries to enrich our aesthetic experience and sharpen our critical focus.

Schoenberger concludes her essay by reminding readers of James Winn’s commitment to the humanities. Winn never forgot that a nation versed in Goethe and Shakespeare proved comfortable committing genocide. Art “certainly could not have prevented” the atrocities of World War II, he observed. Rather, Winn argued, the moral work of the humanities “resides in the way they are shared” (215). Winn’s work amply demonstrates the idea of conversation that interdisciplinarity takes as its starting point, as do the fine essays contained in this volume.

Alison Conway is the author of Private Interests: Women, Portraiture, and the Visual Culture of the English Novel, 1709–1791 (2001), The Protestant Whore: Courtesan Narrative and Religious Controversy in England, 1680–1750 (2010), and Sacred Engagements: Interfaith Marriage, Religious Toleration, and the British Novel, 1750–1820 (2023).

Quantitative Literary Analysis of the Works of Aphra Behn: Words of Passion by Laura L. Runge. Anthem Press, 2023. 294pp. OA. ISBN 978-1839982019.

Review by Heather Froehlich, University of Arizona, Tucson, United States

In this book, Laura L. Runge does not fall into the trap of over- promising on innovation and dynamic “big data”–style analyses, unlike some other examples of digital humanities scholarship. And, blissfully, Quantitative Literary Analysis does not attempt to produce a study of authorship attribution, declaring early that it is outside the author’s scope and purview to make such claims (as there is a substantial Arts and Humanities Research Council–funded project led by Elaine Hobby and in collaboration with Mel Evans, entitled Editing Aphra Behn in the Digital Age, tackling some of the authorship questions). Instead, Runge begins with the major premise that Behn is speaking about the role of the “passions” in three distinct sub-corpora, with one case study per chapter: the collected poetry, the collected drama, and in the collected prose writings. Runge presents three case studies to introduce readers to the concept of corpus linguistics methods. These case studies use specific lexical concepts as proxy for the scholarly understanding of “passions” as they are leveraged in the form. In the first chapter, Runge explores the role of eyes, heart, soul, and mind in Behn’s poetry. The second chapter, investigating dramatic writing, traces the use of Sir and Love as evidence of synchronic change. The third chapter returns to the eyes, heart, soul, and mind as a means of measuring kinds of “love” in prose writing.

This monograph is extremely interested in re-evaluating scholarship around Behn’s writing by testing long-held assertions with data. While this means that we occasionally miss out on the opportunity to be surprised about Behn’s use of language, it has the potential to lay groundwork for additional re-evaluations of major authors’ works using data. This is a much more important and interesting premise than it may seem at first glance. For scholars of Behn and the larger world of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century dramatic writers, Runge provides an excellent model for successfully re-establishing how these specific lexical items help unlock the promise of quantification to understand language at scale. Chapter 2 is a good example of starting in one place of expectation before moving into the more exciting discussion of high-frequency function words such as “thee” and “thou.” In the other chapters, Runge sometimes risks the criticism of cherry-picking her vocabulary of interest. But, selecting lexemes to stand in for specific concepts is an acceptable route and is commonly used in other digital humanities scholarship.

A challenge here is packaging this material in a way that is accessible to readers. More assiduous use of tables rather than graphs or narratives would have been most welcome, to help the reader follow the argument and to pull out other lexical items that may be worth pursuing. Similarly, the inclusions of graphs make for challenging interpretative modes: though one can zoom in to see greater detail in the e-book version, that is not a guarantee for anyone encountering the print edition. The addition of supplementary materials through appendices and QR codes taking readers directly to the data for additional review is most welcome. Runge could have been more discerning in what a reader needs in the primary text to understand her argument and what can live in the supplementary material(s).

The book could have spent more time justifying the hows and whys of the methods Runge chooses. Some readers will come in as experts on the content, but not necessarily the method; the choices Runge makes must be clear to all parties. She strives to strike a balance between her two intended readers of the literary historian and the quantitative researcher. This is, of course, a tricky balance. It is clear that Runge has spent time in the methodological trenches, though there are some missing, important citations.

At its core, this book is attuned to how literary analysis can benefit from quantification, though the journey can be somewhat uneven. I am intrinsically aware of how difficult it is to make quantification both interesting and meaningful. It is not easy to bring a reader on the journey between these two opposing poles of numbers and interpretation. I want to commend Runge for making the effort to connect her readers back to the texts wherever possible. When the book returns to its comfort zones of close reading and literary interpretation, it shines. Researchers—especially graduate students—who are looking for new directions in formal analysis will benefit immensely from this book, especially as a starting point to find other key terms to analyze and methods to consider.

Heather Froehlich, PhD, is the Digital Scholarship Specialist at the University of Arizona. Her work draws heavily on corpus stylistics, historical sociolinguistics, literary linguistics, and digital humanities.

Mary Wollstonecraft: Cosmopolitan by Laura Kirkley. Edinburgh University Press, 2022. 288pp. $120. ISBN 978-1399503099.

Review by Catherine Packham, University of Sussex, England, United Kingdom

Laura Kirkley’s monograph study of Mary Wollstonecraft as a cosmo- politan comes at a time of heightened interest in Wollstonecraft as a philosopher and thinker as well as a writer, following in the wake of important work by Barbara Taylor, Virginia Sapiro, Eileen Hunt, and others, which continues to add to our understanding of this important figure. Kirkley’s contribution to the field explores Wollstonecraft’s writings in a transnational context, plugging her into a network of trans-European writers and thinkers, not least through her reviews and translation work. This framework, combined with Kirkley’s sustained exposition of the universalist reach of Wollstonecraft’s moral and political philosophy, produces this account of Wollstonecraft as cosmopolitan: specifically, as a writer consistently arguing for a cosmopolitan ethics that also informs her political appeals for rights and justice. Taking a chronological approach (which also enables her to reference, where appropriate, Wollstonecraft’s life events), Kirkley traces how this philosophical framework is present from the early Thoughts on the Education of Daughters and Original Stories, as well as informing her “interventionist” translation of Salzmann’s Elements of Morality (22); Kirkley discusses all the major works, including the understudied Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (HMV), and devotes two chapters to the Letters from Sweden, Norway and Denmark, with Wrongs of Woman considered in a coda.

Kirkley’s approach means that our understanding of Wollstonecraft as educator and moralist is consistently folded into the larger frame of her philosophical concern with universal justice. Moral universalism begins in the home, it turns out, by inculcating these principles in children, in work often undertaken by women. Given that Wollstonecraft’s cosmo- politanism draws markedly on the power of sympathetic feeling, educating emotion is an important part of the project: developing the right kinds of feelings, curtailing the wrong ones. At the same time, Kirkley is careful to show that Wollstonecraft’s cosmopolitanism has rational foundation too; her account of the balance and tensions between these elements is one of the strengths of Mary Wollstonecraft: Cosmopolitan. Our picture of Wollstonecraft as a feminist educator in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman is deepened and enriched by contextualizing her claims for rights for women within a cosmopolitan outlook. Kirkley shows that the educational reforms for which Wollstonecraft argues are part of a broader political reformist programme with potential to reach across national borders to bring about universal human improvements.

Wollstonecraft’s texts and textual strategies, as much as her ideas themselves, are often centre stage in Kirkley’s analysis—rightly so. This approach especially pays off when, as in a compelling chapter on the early fiction Mary, Kirkley shows how Wollstonecraft deploys Rousseauvian semi-autobiographical personae to explore tensions between erotic love and philanthropic feeling, or subjective experience and philosophical conclusions. It is certainly convincing to be shown how Wollstonecraft’s cosmopolitanism finds expression in her textual practices, as a reviewer or translator. In later chapters, where Wollstonecraft’s political beliefs come under stress as the French Revolution proceeds, Kirkley reads textual unevenness (in Wollstonecraft’s history or travel letters) as evidence of her struggling to persist with a cosmopolitan project. There is a risk that attention to literary strategy works to maintain a thesis about cosmopolitanism, rather than to allow a crisis in that outlook to be fully expressed. If, following Rousseau, Wollstonecraft is “prescient” about the difficulties, even paradoxes, of her ideological position, as shown through her choices of style or expression, what does it mean that a cosmopolitan in the second half of the 1790s is obliged to deploy such strategies? If, as Kirkley argues, the Letters from Sweden demonstrate a “cosmopolitan subjectivity” (167), what does it mean for cosmopolitanism that that text’s persona skates so close to despair, melancholy, and death? How might cosmopolitanism be absolutely decentered and challenged, perhaps radically reformed, by this text in ways that Kirkley doesn’t quite allow?

Kirkley draws on work by several present-day theorists of cosmopolitanism, including Martha Nussbaum, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Thomas Bender, to flesh out her account of a Wollstonecraft concerned with a “cosmopolitan ethic of caring” (176); present-day concerns are also reflected in her consideration of Wollstonecraft’s ability to balance cosmopolitanism with attention to national and cultural diversity. By contrast, there is much less attention to Enlightenment thinkers or theorists of cosmopolitanism. Rousseau’s stylistic influence on Wollstonecraft is usefully explored, but much less his attention to the clash between cosmopolitan and patriotic sentiments, or his theorization of resistance to social bonds. The last decades of the eighteenth century saw concerted efforts to work transnationally for the kinds of political equalities, justices, and improvements that Wollstonecraft sought, by mapping alternative political and economic directions for Britain, Europe, and America, but there is little attention to this context in Kirkley’s study. Thus, while she quotes Wollstonecraft’s approval of contemporary “science” whose “researches embrace all human kind” (HMV), Kirkley glosses this rather abstractly as “investigative processes dependent on reason” (107), though it is possible Wollstonecraft had specifically in mind the work of contemporary cosmopolitan thinkers and writers that informed the Girondin group with which she associated while in France. And while Kirkley links Wollstonecraft’s praise for the independent farmers of northern Norway with the cult of Ossian, it might also have brought to mind the agrarian independence Wollstonecraft’s mentor Richard Price identified in the new republic of America: one of the canvases on which cosmopolitan ideals were projected.

As Wollstonecraft was working, in the last decades of the eighteenth century, a new international order was indeed being constructed, based not on benevolence and moral principle but on commerce, allied to national power, and frequently expressed in open warfare between nations. The allure of agrarian existence in republican America expressed the perhaps impossible dream of escaping from that new world order. How the ideals of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism might survive in such a world of commerce, competition, and war was one of the most pressing questions for cosmopolitan thinkers of Wollstonecraft’s time. The fram- ing of Kirkley’s argument, with its attention to the internal tensions and contradictions within Wollstonecraft’s cosmopolitan thought, doesn’t quite allow this question to come to the fore in what is nevertheless a valuable and illuminating study.

Catherine Packham is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature and Thought and Head of English Department at the University of Sussex. She is the author of Mary Wollstonecraft and Political Economy: The Feminist Critique of Commercial Modernity (2024).

Publishing the Woman Writer in England, 1670–1750 by Leah Orr. Oxford University Press, 2023. 352pp. $100. ISBN 978-0192886293.

Review by Melanie Bigold, Cardiff University, Wales, United Kingdom

Leah Orr’s quantitative approach to literary history has already con- tributed significant revisioning evidence about the production and circulation of texts in the long eighteenth century. Her monograph Novel Ventures (2017) as well as various articles have helped to illuminate the potential receptions of texts in the eighteenth-century marketplace. Her present book builds on this impressive knowledge base to revisit the historiography and evidence for women’s writings across this eighty-year period. In the process, she offers some timely suggestions for changing methodological approaches to female authorship based on the insights of book history. As such, Publishing the Woman Writer in England, 1670– 1750 is both a summative, state-of-the-field monograph and, through its case studies, a practical manual of how to use bibliographical evidence to better understand historical authorship. It will prove useful, in particular, to students and scholars of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women writers, but also to those wanting to better understand the diverse and changing landscape of print publication in the long eighteenth century.

Orr’s main research question is “How, when, and for what reasons did women’s names appear on their works?” (v); or, in other words, How does gendered authorship on title pages come to be a thing? To frame the rationale for this query, Orr points out that in “the sixteenth century, women’s names rarely appear on title pages; by the end of the eighteenth century, they not only frequently do so, but they constitute a majority of author names for fiction” (v). Her headline statistics reveal that “in the period 1670–1750, over 200 different women’s names appeared on 389 works, and a further 148 appeared in print without a name but with a female gender designation such as ‘by a lady’” (v). Orr notes that many of these authors’ names do not appear in traditional literary histories because their outputs are not the plays, poetry, and novels that we study and teach; instead, they are the conduct books, recipe compilations, religious pamphlets, letters, lives, and histories that contribute in variously gnomic or impactful ways toward our contextual constructions of broader culture trends. Nevertheless, as Orr reasons, this significant contingent of writers must have helped shape emerging concepts of “woman writer” and, therefore, must tell us something about the construction of literary authorship in the period. It is an insightful and important reframing.

Orr, like many book historians, starts from the basis that authorship is a constructed and mediated role, and she makes the familiar complaint against the biographical imperatives that shaped so much of early twentieth-century feminist recovery work. This is old ground for many, yet it is still necessary for the new generations we teach; I recommend Orr’s opening chapter, “Perspectives on Women Writers in Print since 1670,” as a very useful summative resource for those students. Orr adds to scholarly work in the field through her capacious knowledge of the print market in the period and therefore a better contextual understanding of the distinctiveness (or, more often, not) of the authorial or gendered roles presented through the paratextual apparatus (for example, title pages, frontispieces, prefaces, dedications, and, yes, lives). As a result, she re- evaluates the famous and the marginal in refreshing ways.

Across the first three chapters, Orr explores a series of print market contexts and mediations that shaped women writers’ engagement with or presentation in print culture, with each chapter ending with a repre- sentative case study. Beginning with the costs, possible motivations, and benefits associated with print publication, Orr’s interesting selection of examples are contrasting rather than conclusive. However, by revealing the variety and shifting arguments that authors and mediators deployed for appearing in print, Orr demonstrates the methodological necessity of book history in any discussion of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century authorial self-fashioning. At the same time, though Orr insists this is not mining for biographical details, biography need not be constructed as the antithesis to book history; Orr’s methods and insights are relevant to life writing studies, literary history, or historical biography, whichever way you want to frame it. The aim is to understand the performance of the writing self. While modern biography is popularly associated with ideas of the reality or authenticity of individual identity, biography is, historically, a subgenre of history (and certainly was in this period). Orr’s case studies—Aphra Behn, Catharine Trotter Cockburn, and Laetitia Pilkington—are all imbricated in that genre history, and that is what makes them such rich subjects.

The most original intervention comes in chapter 5, “Women in Translation,” where she points out that one “well-known way that the woman writer was constructed in England was as a foreigner” (200). Orr reveals the important presence that authors such as Madeleine de Scudéry, Madeleine-Angélique de Gomez, or Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baroness d’Aulnoy, among others, had in the English market; Aulnoy, for instance, was one of the most reprinted women in the entire period (200). These authors were not always known or, indeed, represented as women writers at the time, and Orr’s discussion of the publishers and translators whose constructions, obfuscations, or reconstructions of these women and their texts reveals a fascinating body of material. It also reminds us of the cosmopolitan reading tastes of the long eighteenth century.

The final chapter, “Real and Imagined Readers,” is perhaps the least successful because it is the area with the most individual and equivocal evidence. Unlike previous chapters grounded in impressive quantitative research, this chapter presents a scattering of examples. The most problematic aspect of this book, however, has nothing to do with Orr’s careful work: the poor production quality from OUP proved challenging. In addition to numerous copywriting errors and glued pages, the provided paper review copy fell apart while I was reading it.

From 1670 to 1750, nearly 700 works are now identified as written by women, and though this is less than one per cent of the total print output, Orr’s exploration and command of this corpus will help to inform research on women’s writing in this period for years to come.

Melanie Bigold is Reader in Literature in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University. Her current book project focuses on women’s libraries and book ownership, 1660–1820.