Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century

5HFHQW6WXGLHVLQWKH5HVWRUDWLRQDQG(LJKWHHQWK&HQWXU\ -HQQ\'DYLGVRQ 6(/6WXGLHVLQ(QJOLVK/LWHUDWXUH9ROXPH1XPEHU6XPPHU SS$UWLFOH 3XEOLVKHGE\-RKQV+RSNLQV8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV '2,VHO )RUDGGLWLRQDOLQIRUPDWLRQDERXWWKLVDUWLFOH KWWSVPXVHMKXHGXDUWLFOH Access provided by Columbia University (9 Aug 2016 16:29 GMT) SEL 56,Davidson Jenny 3 (Summer 2016): 671–725 671 671 ISSN 0039-3657 © 2016 Rice University Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century JENNY DAVIDSON I remember the days of graduate school when every future professional milestone glowed with the luster of the infinitely de- sirable, desirable precisely because attainable only as a “stretch” goal. The idea of publishing an article in PMLA or being invited to give a named lecture had the same kind of allure that I would later discern, at an altogether different stage of life, in training to complete an Ironman triathlon, and the invitation last year to write SEL’s Restoration and Eighteenth-Century omnibus review chimed the gong of that past self. The invitation represents a signal honor in the profession, one I felt fortunate to receive and could not imagine having the temerity to decline. At first the job seemed to possess such clearly defined parameters that I imag- ined I would find liberation in constraint, after the manner of the Oulipo writers, but I had a bad late-stage revelation, after reading the flyer sent by a major university press editor in advance of the Pittsburgh meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth- Century Studies in late March, that none of that press’s recent books were currently in my possession, and there was probably always going to be some last-minute scrambling to lay my hands on volumes whose omission would render the entire enterprise suspect. The books have come in boxes of various sizes, then, over the course of nearly a year, and this roundup will cover Jenny Davidson is a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. She has published two books on eighteenth-century British literature and culture, Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness: Man- ners and Morals from Locke to Austen (2004) and Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century (2009). Her most recent book is Reading Style: A Life in Sentences (2014), and she is at work now on two short books, one about Edward Gibbon’s composition of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and the other about how to read Jane Austen’s fiction. 672 Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century published scholarship received by SEL between February 2015 and February 2016. The task’s strongest incentive for my present-day self, aside from the intrinsic satisfaction of the knowledge one gains by taking this kind of cross section of one’s field, derived from my sense of the utility that sense of the field might hold for my own graduate students as I help them decide what dissertations to write and then, later, what forms those dissertations will take in the world as published scholarly research. In one aspect, then, my inter- est all along has been strongest in what can crudely but slightly inaccurately be labeled the “first book,” by which I really mean something narrower: a book in the form of a monograph that is published by a scholar in the early part of his or her career—but here I am already running into trouble. A first book need not be published early in a career, but might rather appear midcareer or indeed represent the crowning of a career in retirement. Even the early-career first book might or might not be based on a disserta- tion; such a book might represent the main accomplishment of a stint on the tenure track, or it might represent the conclusion to a period that began in graduate school but will not culminate in a tenure-stream position. A digital humanities project might replace rather than supplement the first book, or a first book in the literal sense might be a scholarly edition (or a biography or a novel or a collection of essays or a memoir) rather than necessarily appearing in the form of a freestanding monograph. I think it’s important to note that many of our own students (doctoral as well as undergraduate) will ultimately choose to write and publish in modes that are not explicitly scholarly, however much their writing may be informed by the academic reading and writing they did during the years of working toward a degree. In sum, there is a good deal of academic elitism and a somewhat blinkered narrow- ness of vision embedded in the very premise that a first book will have the properties I initially ascribed to it. Not only will many gifted scholars make eminently legitimate other choices about how to allocate their writing energies, I would also add that edit- ing a teaching edition of a lesser-known text, though it may not possess the prestige of the first book as published by a top-tier university press, may well represent a more useful and conse- quential contribution to knowledge than a notional monograph on the same topic, although tenure committees will not always agree with this relative valuation. And yet, with all of these qualifications, there remains a power- ful and influential idea in our profession that a dissertation should Jenny Davidson 673 naturally become a first book that will then serve as the chief ex- hibit in a tenure dossier, certainly at research universities but at many elite teaching institutions as well, and the first long section of my review will concentrate on a selection of those first books with a view to detecting patterns in the current range of choices of subject and approach and to offering some thoughts about what works best in that format. Elsewhere, I will attend more closely to other forms of publication; there are web-like properties to the material here, of course, in that any given publication will likely connect to three or four or five other nodes in the set, and I will note some of those substantive intellectual connections along the way when it seems appropriate. I proceed by way of taxonomy. From the individual scholar’s point of view, a few different factors will feed into the choice of what kind of publication to produce (this is aside from the question of what subject matter to work on, which is also responsive to pressures both internal and external): external factors would include the availability (or not) of research leave, access to primary and secondary sources, and payoffs in terms of career advancement and relative prestige, but internal traits figure strongly here as well. Do you prefer working at the scale of an article, with its potential for elegance and economy, or with the greater heft and potential for juxtaposition involved in a book? Do you prefer the utility of editing a teaching edition, via a press like Broadview, of a book not easily currently available in print, or do you find it more enjoyable and stimulating to make that case by way of an essay or a monograph? What kinds of editorial work do you enjoy—reviewing manuscripts for journals and presses while comments can still affect the work’s final form, reviewing books in print for periodicals, editing primary texts for scholarly editions or teaching? Or does it suit you better to organize a conference and perhaps afterward to solicit and write a framing introduction for a volume of essays in the wake of that initial “live” intellectual gathering? These preferences emerge over the course of a career, and it is the wide variety of options more than the narrowness of the path that strikes me as I contemplate this year’s work in the field. FIRST BOOKS I will open by describing three different types of the first book that I especially admire and offering five commendable in- stances of those types. A more gradated taxonomy will emerge as I introduce the others—I count eighteen, though category error 674 Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century may have introduced itself and I welcome corrections from any scholar whose work I have misrepresented. The first type, then, is the classic first monograph. It is a quite traditional form, but I do not intend to disparage it with that adjective—I believe that in some sense it remains the best prototype for a dissertation in the historicist branch of literary studies (it has dominated as a model chiefly because of its power and versatility), and it is certainly the one that most of my own dissertation students prefer to hew to. This style of first book defines a topic or field of inquiry and then tells the story of how that category emerged (over some clearly defined period of time) as newly important or newly constituting a problematic for literature, for writing more generally or sometimes even for the culture at large; it can be focused on a single genre or, more likely (especially in eighteenth-century studies), on multiple genres, motivated in that case by the notion that invoking evidence from the widest possible range of kinds of writing will provide more insight into pervasive patterns of change over time in the literary culture at large. It is intrinsically historicist, but within that commitment it may take a broad-brushstroke approach to patterns of change or alternately it may focus on a specific line of historical transformation as manifested in detailed evidence about a set of texts and events (or some mix of the two), their influence, and reception. Another way of subcategorizing this kind of book is to say that while it sometimes represents a collection of case studies that cumulatively make a point by way of a constellation of examples, it will at other times be constituted as the only story that could be told, with causality and selectiveness of reporting featuring more prominently in the project’s intellectual rationale. This overstates the distinction too starkly, and most books will fall somewhere on the middle of the spectrum, but it is especially important for early-career scholars to develop and articulate this sort of methodological self-awareness over the course of produc- ing a dissertation or a book manuscript. My first of two examples of the classic first monograph repre- sents one of my very favorite books of the entire assemblage. Jacob Sider Jost’s Prose Immortality, 1711–1819 opens with a striking and to my mind indisputable observation concerning the ways that writers in this period chose to memorialize the dead: “When John Dryden died in 1700, poets wrote elegies. When Samuel Johnson died in 1784, biographers wrote lives. This book is about what happens in between” (p. 1). The title phrase, “prose immortality,” refers to a new function for prose in the eighteenth century: “For the first time, writing is imagined as a way of immortalizing not Jenny Davidson 675 only heroic acts or transcendent beauty but also the rhythms and events of daily life” (p. 2). This “aspiration … to use documentary writing that attends to the rhythms and events of everyday life to preserve a particular individual in such detail that he or she is felt to survive beyond physical death” (p. 3) is the book’s occasion and preoccupation, and Jost seeks to answer two principal ques- tions about the emergence of this new function of writing: what developments in literary form and literary genre were necessary to enable it, and why did the underlying desire for new forms of memorialization in writing become so powerful in this period? The second question must be answered in part by invoking new anxieties about how to conceptualize the survival of an individual self after death in an era that judges religious conceptions of the afterlife to be increasingly untenable, but Jost supplements Leo Braudy’s case for secularization in this period having led to fame and the approval of posterity largely replacing notions of a religious afterlife by noting that many of the seventeenth– and eighteenth-century writers whose preoccupation with fame is most striking were personally pious (Milton, Samuel Richardson, Samuel Johnson, James Boswell); literary immortality and spiri- tual eternity thus “form a combined response to the threats of death and annihilation,” providing “a mutually reinforcing set of images and metaphors” in which “the republication of a book is described as the resurrection of a body, or the verdict of critics is compared to God’s judgment” (pp. 7–8). This results, then, in new literary forms: “Boswell’s fear of the ‘waste’ of an undocumented life cannot be assuaged by a fourteen-line sonnet; only a diary or biography can begin to offer the textual copiousness he needs. Richardson’s Clarissa connects this authoritative biographical record to personal salvation; the massive novel doubles as a Book of Life vindicating its heroine both to its readers and to God” (p. 8). Literary immortality shifts from the traditional lyric orienta- tion to “the anecdotal, documentary preservation of human life over and through daily time” (p. 11). Documentary acts of me- morialization in this period come to provide a bulwark against the threat of skepticism on the one hand and the fear of death on the other, with the epistemology of empiricism frequently enlisted in the service of actively “theological ends” (pp. 13–4). The book traces “the emergence of the paradigm of prose immortality and cognate changes in the conception of the Christian afterlife” from The Spectator and Night Thoughts, which Jost argues use periodi- cal publication and nonnarrative form “to imagine the afterlife in terms borrowed from modern chronometry and secular time,” 676 Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century through to midcentury for an extended consideration of Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison: two major attempts, Jost argues, one tragic and one comic, “to integrate the new conception of immortal- ity developed by Addison and Young into narrative prose” (p. 15). The last part of the book treats “authors who theorize and practice afterlife writing, using prose to preserve themselves and others in texts that reflect anxieties about personal survival,” most cen- trally Laetitia Pilkington’s Memoirs, Johnson’s essays and other writings, and Boswell’s Life of Johnson, and Jost concludes with a discussion of John Keats’s desire for an anecdotal biography of Shakespeare, which he takes to be “an expression of the curiosity and desire aroused by the prose immortality paradigm” (p. 15). It is a wonderful book, consistently stimulating and thought provok- ing, and it has genuinely altered my understanding of the later eighteenth-century life-writing projects that are such a striking feature of the literary and cultural history of the period. I should add that Prose Immortality is published by the University of Vir- ginia Press as the winner of the Walker Cowen Memorial Prize for an Outstanding Work of Scholarship in Eighteenth-Century Studies, which represents an excellent venue for scholars early in their careers looking to publish a first monograph. Another book that stood out for me in this initial category of first book, though in this case it is the more groundedly historicist iteration (“this is the one and only story” rather than “this is my version of a story that could be traced in some other collection of texts as well”), is Teresa Michals’s captivating and highly persua- sive Books for Children, Books for Adults: Age and the Novel from Defoe to James. This is a good example of a topic that has itself the force of revelation: I did not know before I saw this volume that it was the book I most wanted to read, but Michals begins with another one of these striking observations-cum-puzzles (it is a very effective way to frame and motivate an extended intellectual investigation that can’t rely, as so much scholarship situated within the discipline of history rather than literary studies may be in a position to do, on the pure force of narrative to keep the reader immersed across large swaths of pages). The defense in the 1960 obscenity trial of Penguin Books for D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover dismissed the prosecution’s suggestion that this was a book that members of the jury would not wish their children, their wives, or their servants to read—an admoni- tion that provoked laughter in the courtroom when it was first uttered—as functionally obsolete, an idea about distinctions of readership that may have characterized book publishing in an Jenny Davidson 677 earlier era but that no longer fit the contours of modern society. In the present day, argued counsel for the defense, class and gender could no longer legitimately be invoked to protect certain kinds of readers from material presumed to be dangerous: age alone, indeed, might remain a legitimate criterion for limiting readership, but “‘Society cannot fix its standards by what is suitable for a young person of 14’” (p. 1). Lady Chatterley’s Lover might be an unsuitable book for children, in other words, but “it deserved to be published because it was a good book for a new figure, one recently granted a central place in literary matters: the adult” (p. 1). Children’s reading, Michals goes on to observe, has been of interest for fifty years now—but where is the corresponding work on how “adult” matters as a description of literature, or how changing notions of adulthood over time led to “the emergence of the idea of books intended specifically for adult readers in the writing and the reception of English novels” (p. 2)? In an earlier period, “the novel was written for a mixed-age audience,” including women, children, and servants (p. 2); indeed, vernacular litera- ture was by definition directed toward this kind of promiscuous readership. Children’s literature thus can’t be thought of as an offshoot of literature written for adult readers: age specialization only emerged in the middle of the eighteenth century with a newly distinct and commercial market for children’s literature, and “[t]hese children’s books contrasted with novels intended for a mixed-age audience—not with novels intended for adults. Special- ization by age for adults occurred only much later in the history of the novel” (p. 2). Michals mines relatively little-known adapta- tions of some of the eighteenth– and nineteenth-century fictions in which she’s interested for what they tell us about reading and reception, and her detailed account of these developments reveals how and why “some books originally written for a mixed-age au- dience, such as Robinson Crusoe, eventually became children’s literature, while others written for this same audience, such as Pamela, became adult novels” (p. 3). The literary history that put Henry James in a position where it could even occur to him to decide that he wanted to write for an audience of adults only, in other words, is one in which an older social and reading world that is heterogeneous but conceived primarily in terms of status divisions—husbands and wives, masters and servants—becomes a world whose only significant reading divide is that between adults and children (p. 3). Social history, literary history, and histories of reading are all of importance here, with the main burden of the book being to trace changes in the relationship between the 678 Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century terms child and adult in the eighteenth– and nineteenth-century book market, arguing “that in reading, as in other kinds of hu- man activities, it is the difference between these two terms that becomes newly important, influencing not only modern ideas about childhood and the child reader, but also modern ideas about adulthood and the adult reader” (p. 11). Chapters follow a fascinating and relatively little-known his- tory of adaptation and chapbook dissemination, showing that the audience for Crusoe was initially differentiated primarily by social status and degree of literacy, with age only later becoming a central concept for understanding the novel’s priorities, values, and appeal to readers (p. 13); that Pamela, which both shares traits with and markedly differentiates itself from a book such as John Newbery’s 1765 The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes, represents a sort of “flashpoint for the representation of sexuality in relation to age” (p. 14), with its reception history speaking to “conflict between traditional ideas of age based on social status and the challenge to these ideas represented by developmental theories of age most influentially formulated by John Locke, and popularized in part through the emergence of a market for children’s literature largely framed along Lockean lines” (p. 14). A developmental model of childhood comes even more strongly to influence the choices of Letitia Barbauld, Maria Edgeworth, and Walter Scott, although Michals’s chapter on these writers foregrounds disparities between their developmental model and our own: their protagonists “reach maturity as this stage is under- stood by the eighteenth-century conjectural historians, becoming, not psychologically complex adults, but polite and commercial people” (p. 15). “Changing ideas of age,” Michals goes on to add, “shape not only Scott’s critical reputation, but also the rise and meteoric fall in critical esteem of historical fiction as a whole” (p. 15), and the genre of historical fiction would come to be seen as intrinsically juvenile—“a sub-literary genre particularly suited to immature readers” (p. 15). This is one of the most interesting and intellectually stimulating books about literature that I’ve read in the past few years, and I hope it will reach the wider audience it deserves. I should note that although this project required a willingness to cross conventional subfield boundaries, any reader of the MLA job list in recent years must have wondered whether the fields of eighteenth– and nineteenth-century British literature can still be considered meaningful professional subdivisions or whether they are morphing into one longer field that occupies all the space between the early modernists’ tranche and an emerg- ing “20–21” specialty. Jenny Davidson 679 The next pair of books I want to single out falls under my sec- ond category of first book, a category that is less clearly defined in my mind than my initial one and that I am tempted just to call the “category of uncategorizables” pace Jorge Luis Borges. Let me instead more usefully give it the rubric “books of unusual format and methodology.” Both of the two I instance here are method- ologically ambitious, learned, beautifully written, self-aware about field and discipline, and aspiring to a sort of theoretical interven- tion that exceeds period boundaries and speaks to questions of change over time, but in a way that is not intrinsically historicist after the fashion of the traditional monograph. I should add that while most good academic books take quite a long time to write, this kind of book—because of its ambition and scope, but also because of the extent to which the author may need to invent his or her own tools—often represents a long-term commitment that can be at odds with typical career constraints and tenure timelines. (In the afterword he wrote for the 2000 reissue of The Machine in the Garden, Leo Marx says that after submitting his dissertation, he worked on it for fifteen more years before it be- came a book: “Fifteen years. Even back in 1964, I must admit, that was deemed excessive, but today it is hard to imagine that an untenured scholar would be allowed that much time to get out a first book—at least not if he meant to hold on to an appointment at a respectable college or university.”1) I do not myself have the temperament to conceive or write this kind of book, but it is a type I greatly admire, and these two superb instantiations share to an uncanny degree the same set of topics and problematics even as each represents a quite different significant intellectual contribution. I refer to Brad Pasanek’s Metaphors of Mind: An Eighteenth-Century Dictionary and Sean Silver’s The Mind Is a Collection: Case Studies in Eighteenth-Century Thought. (Full disclosure: I was a reader of Metaphors of Mind in manuscript for Johns Hopkins University Press, and I am on record elsewhere as a great enthusiast for the project.) Christina Lupton wrote a perceptive joint review of the pair of books for the LARB (5 March 2016) that opens by noting that both books are framed by a discussion of questions of method, appropriate at this “strange point in the history of intellection” in which “the ‘how’ of finding out often looms larger as a form of innovation than the ‘what’”; in drawing out other dimensions of the likeness, she adds that both projects exist at once in book form and also as websites, and that both “study cognition as it has been imagined physically, through metaphor and the early history of extended cognition.” Both are 680 Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century also, I might add, beautifully produced books, monuments to the potential for humanities scholarship in an age where resources have come to seem scarce and where the digital humanities are more often positioned as a threat to other kinds of work in the humanities than as—both of these scholars would surely have it this way—one of its most sublime variations. Metaphors of Mind takes the form, playfully and with delib- erate and self-conscious anachronism, of an eighteenth-century philosophical dictionary. It is constituted as a series of essays on a number of the chief conceptual keywords under which metaphors of mind clustered during this period, so that an entry on coinage begins by offering a set of “collocated keywords” (coin, counterfeit, fund, guinea, medal, mind), a count of metaphors in Pasanek’s literary database, a set of literary epigraphs, and finally a number of cross-references to related entries (impressions, metal). This book is my pick for the year’s most essential reading in eighteenth- century studies: it is playful, intelligent, and insightful in very full measure, and it will change the way you think about language and the self (surely at bottom the most fundamental goal for all work in literary criticism). Each entry has a degree of internal coherence and development, although Pasanek’s literary precur- sors are more the seventeenth-century ramblers (Robert Burton, Sir Thomas Browne) than either the encyclopedists or the cogent British essayists such as David Hume and Edward Gibbon, and it is perhaps the degree of productive tension between Pasanek’s keen analytic intelligence and his baroque magpie sensibility that gives this book such strong appeal. It is one hazard of a formally or methodologically unorthodox project that it stymies other im- portant forms of professional interrogation, and I would imagine that earlier versions of the project contained less in the way of fully realized answers to the sorts of questions and concerns that readers expecting a more traditional monograph will inevitably bring to its pages. The book’s introduction offers the kind of methodological framing that I think is essential in a project that can’t take for granted relatively conventional and familiar meth- odologies, contextualizing its use of tools like commonplacing and “desultory reading” not just against a tradition of “keyword” cultural investigations after the manner of Raymond Williams but against theoretical treatments of metaphor by linguists and philosophers (J. L. Austin’s program of “dictionary reading” is an important precursor and inspiration here [p. 8]) and against the almost “anti-commonplacing” we get by way of reading in a database. Pasanek calls his own keyword searching “a last-ditch Jenny Davidson 681 John Henry effort” (p. 13), and both his electronic archives and his statistical methodologies have an endearing MacGyveresque charm, but the path he forges in the wake of Franco Moretti’s call for “‘formalism without close reading’” (p. 16) has allowed Pasanek to develop a number of genuinely powerful interpretive strate- gies for coping with the sheer unreadable fact of the quantity of material that survives from the period and that is now available to us at our fingertips, on a screen, at any hour of day or night. Pasanek promises to carry “a principle of pastiche and the meth- ods of montage into literary history,” adhering to the “detailism” discerned by Alan Liu in microhistory but in a fashion that harks back less to Carlo Ginzburg and the microhistorians of that school than to Walter Benjamin’s practice of arranging collections of quotations in a form Hannah Arendt identified as “a ‘citational poetics’” (p. 18). “Accumulated examples become legible through literary montage,” Pasanek continues: “[C]omposition is explana- tion. This shoring of fragments against ruin belongs recognizably to eighteenth-century activities of translation and preservation, activities that are inherited and repeated in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries” (p. 18). There is nothing naively presentist, though, about Pasanek’s interpretive undertaking. His conclusion revisits the special status of metaphor and its changes over time by way of their implications for literary and cultural history, stak- ing out a clear and balanced position about change and stasis that Pasanek characterizes as a version of dialectical materialism. This argument identifies the “figurative empiricism” of so much eighteenth-century writing (Pasanek borrows the term from the philosopher Annette Baier’s work on Hume) as a symptom of the period’s persistent desire to represent—perhaps to misrep- resent—the facts of mental life as if they were physical realities (p. 252). Such formations, Pasanek says, are generally resistant to change—but, contra contemporary philosophy of mind, “if the mind gives itself the appearance of an objective existence by drawing forms from material culture and applying them to itself, to what does ‘mind’ refer but to congeries of metaphors, which themselves only obliquely signify that cultural origin?” (p. 253). Like Pasanek, Silver is trained as a literary historian, but Sil- ver’s work belongs to a strand of material and cultural history that, while it has thrived in literature departments in the United States, is not fundamentally linguistic or literary in its priorities. The Mind Is a Collection, which appears in the University of Pennsylvania Press’s Material Texts series, presents itself as an aggregation of twenty-eight “exhibits” from seventeenth– and eighteenth-century 682 Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century London which, taken together, “tell a story about the development of modern theories of mind” (p. vii). Both the aesthetic dimension of the case of curiosities and the structural and methodological aspects of case-based thinking are important here: not the “case” of seventeenth– and eighteenth-century casuistry, I should clarify, but “case” as in Sigmund Freud’s “case study” or the “cases” of Sherlock Holmes. Silver invokes the term “cognitive ecology” to describe “a system crafted to enable certain kinds of thinking, indeed, to confirm and to conform to a specific working theory of mind” (p. viii). He argues that mind-body dualism, with its “doc- trine of radical separation,” was ironically “elaborated through a series of profound entanglements,” and that “the fundamental split between mind and matter was established and confirmed through embodied engagement with crafted environments” (p. viii)—leveraged on this collection of objects, then, selection, jux- taposition, and description will be more powerful tools for the critic than chronological narration or extended and explicit con- sideration of questions of change over time. This is a history of thinking as an “embedded practice” (p. ix); Silver’s twenty-eight objects (the book is also the exhibition catalog, as it were, for the online museum) cannot exhaust the topic or tell the full story, but rather serve as “the merest trajectory or constellation, objects as points suggesting a larger picture of Enlightenment being” (p. x). The book’s introduction develops a series of key concepts and methodological premises, touching down centrally on empiricism’s ambivalence about metaphor—its commitment to plain style, its addiction to dazzling figuration—and emphasizing the “dialectical to-and-fro between material models and conceptual resources” (p. 14). The design of the book, as a collection of case studies, speaks directly to the question of method: the book “means to do intellectual history through material history, and vice versa. It proposes a renewed awareness of the crossings of material into ideal, ideal into material, sustaining a sensitivity to the ways in which an idea might repeatedly turn up in an object, or an object (or range of objects) might repeatedly constitute an idea. The story of the mind’s metaphors is a story of people’s dialectical bindings to the arrangements of objects they invented, and which paid them back by inventing those people in turn” (p. 18). Silver’s first case contains three objects—Locke’s common- place book, Milton’s bed, and Mark Akenside’s Museum—each of which provides the occasion for an essay that muses and quotes and summarizes and argues in equal measure, with Locke de- picted in opening as “the inventor of a new system of collating Jenny Davidson 683 and storing extracts, a system that was destined to become, in part for the fame of its author, the most popular method for note taking until the end of the eighteenth century” (p. 32). “Locke’s indexing system,” Silver goes on to observe, “is a system suited to the mind he understood himself to have … Likewise, the theory of mind he develops is one suited to, and metaphorically founded on, the filing systems through which he did the work of thinking” (p. 36). Other cases are labeled under headings like design, digression, or dispossession. I was absolutely delighted to see Jonathan Wild’s Lost Property Office make an appearance here, and the book’s final exhibit is Wild’s skeleton, housed at the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, Wild having become, as Silver says, “his own most sensational example of the dismembering accountancy synchronized by the interior of his office” (p. 263). In conclusion, the book’s most fundamental case is “that the glory of the eighteenth century, the establishment of the mind as distinct from body, self from other, and so forth, stems from a greater set of entanglements; ‘the Enlightenment’ is the name for the special state of a network in which the network erases itself, renders itself transparent” (p. 272). But the book is also a richly imaginative guide, lovingly as well as critically curated, to the complex material and literary and philosophical culture of the period. It is clear that eighteenth-century studies benefits greatly from the work of scholars who care deeply about significant theoreti- cal discussions of politics and culture that take place over many humanities disciplines and across chronological periods. Without that, we risk becoming intellectually parochial in all sorts of ways. But one challenge of that kind of work is to resist being domi- nated by a critical perspective that remains distinctly “other” and instead to incorporate the insights and comprehensions of that other discursive field—whether it’s the writing of a single theorist or a body of theory more generally—into a fresh and original ac- count of a topic in eighteenth-century studies. My third category is the “theoretical” first book, and the three monographs I have grouped together under this subheading take on the challenge I described in my last sentence bravely and in different ways. As a reader, I found Tobias Menely’s The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice the most consistently successful of the three (the other two, by Paul Kelleher and Peter DeGabriele re- spectively, will be discussed at greater length later in this essay). Menely’s theoretical framework is drawn not just from Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas, two subtle and powerful think- 684 Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century ers on the speechless eloquence of animals, but also from a rich intellectual reservoir that includes Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, and many others. Menely is interested in the political and literary his- tory of what he calls “the creaturely voice”—the claim or cry the animal makes, a plaint of injury and a plea of interest, as it is heard and registered in communities human and political in the long eighteenth century. In the age of sensibility, Menely argues persuasively, poetry plays a crucial role “in the ways it sought to incorporate the impassioned voice and creaturely perspective into verbal meaning-making at the same time that it identified its relevance as a social institution with its distinctive capacity to address and move a growing reading public” (p. 7). The book’s language is difficult at times, but justifiably so (I was reminded of the work of Anne-Lise François), and readers in our field should be riveted by the electrifying readings of James Thomson and Christopher Smart especially. (Another pleasure of a book like this is that it sends one to track down recent work missed at the time of its initial publication, so that I am grateful to Menely for prompting me quite belatedly to seek out Heather Keenleyside’s 2009 ELH article on personification in The Seasons; Keenley- side’s own book Animals and Other People: Literary Forms and Living Beings in the Long Eighteenth Century will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press later this year.) Proceeding through a significant and varied body of philosophical and literary texts, Menely gives a multifaceted depiction of the “way in which the creaturely voice, an address that originates with the animal, serves to destabilize and redistribute symbolic authority, either as an inexhaustible potential of creaturely substitution in personify- ing tropes or in a multiplication of addresses that establishes the place, always still to come, of the humanitarian public” (p. 85). Menely’s own language is suggestive and striking enough that I will not resist the temptation to quote at greater length: “If figure is what sustains the human by transforming mere life into the shape of a being that may not be justly killed, and if it necessarily does so at the expense of the animal,” he writes at one point, “it is also what preserves the possibility of a justice that transcends the literalness of violence and the anthropomorphisms that are its justification” (p. 105). Elsewhere, he notes persuasively that “[t]o recover the creaturely context of eighteenth-century advocacy is to recognize the ongoing relevance of theology to the justifica- tion of a postabsolutist politics of representation as well as the broader spectrum of creatural relation with which advocacy in the Age of Sensibility concerned itself. It is also to confront more Jenny Davidson 685 fully the fraught status of the advocate, one who claims to have been called to speak at once by and for another. The advocate recognizes an imperative in a voice that in some sense cannot be heard, which is why he or she must, in his or her speaking for, make up for the insufficiency in the voice of the one whom he or she represents” (pp. 130–1). The Animal Claim ends with a powerful reading of Laurence Sterne’s starling, that “prototypical scene of sensibility” (p. 196). Menely believes the starling’s cry represents “a call from beyond the self that unsettles symbolic categories, an extension of sympathetic identification, an attempt at ameliorative action,” but that Sterne is also concerned to depict in this scene “the misrecognitions that underli[e] this identifica- tion and the inadequacy of action inspired by sensibility”: “It is in the dialectical relation between these treatments of sensibility,” Menely concludes, “that Sterne introduces a reflexive dimension into his readers’ sentimental education.” By my well-intentioned but possibly inaccurate count (I could easily have missed a few from this section and/or mis- categorized first books that have been preceded by book-length publications), I received thirteen other books that can be thought of as first monographs, and I’ll organize these more loosely by style and subject matter so as to try and make sense of patterns that emerge. I have divided these books into three groups. The first group falls under the same rubric as the books by Jost and Michals I discussed above; these are ambitious full-length monographs by Rivka Swenson, Michael Gavin, Henry Power, and Christine Lehleiter. The second category revisits the theory rubric whose discussion I initiated in my treatment of Menely just now: the two monographs I treat under that rubric are character- ized by the desire to consider eighteenth-century literature and culture through the lens of theories of the history of sexuality, in the case of Kelleher’s Making Love: Sentiment and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature, and through Agamben and associated recent discussions of sovereignty and subjecthood, in DeGabriele’s Sovereign Power and the Enlightenment: Eighteenth- Century Literature and the Problem of the Political. Finally, under their own separate heading, I will treat seven monographs that, while admirable in their scholarship, are somewhat narrower in the scope of their topics and less likely to be assigned in their entirety, let’s say, as reading for a graduate seminar (I feel the need to apologize for the ruthlessness of these discriminations). Swenson’s Essential Scots and the Idea of Unionism in Anglo- Scottish Literature, 1603–1832 fills a significant gap in the critical 686 Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century literature and touches on moments both familiar and relatively obscure in the history of Anglo-Scottish literary interactions over the long eighteenth century. The first half of the book, titled “Essential Scottishness and the Form of Original Anglo-Scottish Discontent,” includes three chapters: the first juxtaposes Fran- cis Bacon’s commentary on the union of 1603 (the “Union of Crowns”) to Daniel Defoe’s writings on the Act of Union in 1707, and is itself unified by a concern with “anxieties of narration”; the second chapter turns to Tobias Smollett’s writing on Scots and Scotland in the wake of the ’45 and also of the Seven Years’ War; the third treats Johnson’s visit to Scotland as it was affected by his reading of the Ossian poems and his resistance to literary and cultural narratives that “obscured the effects of actual Scottish ruination” (p. 18). The second half of the book, “Unionism and the Challenge of the Individual in Early Nineteenth-Century Scottish Writing,” includes chapters on Susan Ferrier’s Marriage and on an episode in which the Scottish writer Robert Mudie depicted George IV’s visit to Edinburgh in 1822 as a sort of royal homecoming, and the book concludes with a coda on Walter Scott. Swenson is interested in the relationship between parts and wholes: in the conceptualization of that kind of relationship, philosophically, by Locke, but also in its implications for the kinds of metonymy and particularization that we associate not just with a unified nation but also with an emergent literary realism. She tells the story of an “essential Scottishness” that is depicted over this period “as disrupting, resisting, accommodating, or supporting unionism (as politics and as aesthetics),” but that is also increasingly “bal- anced by the idea of a developmental chosen Scottishness” (p. 3). Although the narrative sometimes gets bogged down by the sheer wealth of material, Swenson is both a trustworthy guide to prose narratives and a richly imaginative contextualizer by way of “poems, songs, ballads, broadsides, transparencies, newspapers, commonplace books, joke books, cant dictionaries, political writ- ing, history, travel narratives, engravings, and material artifacts such as medals and snuffboxes” (p. 3). A host of visual images, mostly reproduced by permission of the Lewis Walpole Library, of- fer a particularly vivid supplement to the literary-critical account, and the topographical menu for the 1822 Edinburgh banquet was an unprecedented delight (p. 212). In The Invention of English Criticism, 1650–1760, Michael Gavin explores some constitutive contradictions of the English tradition of literary criticism and considers the ramifications of those contradictions both for how we understand the criticism of Jenny Davidson 687 the period and for our beliefs about the intellectual genealogies and traditions that shape present-day critical institutions and practices. Our term “criticism,” at least when it is applied to writ- ing of the period that evaluates and describes artistic productions, is itself anachronistic—in the late seventeenth century, it really describes something more like (Gavin quotes a 1656 dictionary) “the ‘Art of judging or censuring mens words, writings, or actions’” (p. 3), often with the suggestion that the critics themselves are theatergoers or coffeehouse readers commenting orally rather than necessarily or chiefly in writing, or if in writing, then in its least prestigious printed forms; in their earliest appearances, “critics appear as malevolent readers closely associated with the contem- porary print culture and all of its perceived debasements” (p. 4). There is, then, “a curious disjunction between the vibrant and expanding field of published criticism, on the one hand, and, on the other, the enduringly narrow definition of criticism as such” (p. 4). Writers during the first half of the eighteenth century seem to be almost universally hamstrung by the impossibility of reconciling criticism’s higher aspects with the lowness and scurrility associ- ated with pamphleteering and scandal-mongering, and Gavin is partly interested in this earlier timespan precisely because it is “an undisciplined … period of media shift” (p. 5) in which print criticism exists alongside a wide range of other practices of com- mentary, many of them oral or performative. In contrast to recent histories of the discipline that focus on the institutionalization of criticism and the formation of the concept of literature in the middle of the eighteenth century (Jonathan Kramnick, Clifford Siskin, John Guillory, Robin Valenza), Gavin emphasizes criti- cism’s origins “in this undisciplined period of heterogeneity and conflict” (p. 6). The book’s chapters proceed from telling the story of the 1640s London booksellers who used prefaces and dedica- tions “to simulate an elite coterie of literary judgment” (p. 8) to the Jeremy Collier controversy and debates over the maleficence or otherwise of drama in its social effects, and from there to the rise of periodical criticism, first and especially in the hands of women writers; the second half of the book goes on to focus on four eighteenth-century writers who navigated what seemed to have become an “irredeemably dysfunctional” literary field (p. 9) with varying degrees of success: Anne Finch, Alexander Pope, Boswell, and Johnson. I began reading Henry Power’s Epic into Novel: Henry Fielding, Scriblerian Satire, and the Consumption of Classical Literature in something of a double bind. I care a great deal about Power’s 688 Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century topic—I am a student of Claude Rawson, whose work along these lines has hugely influenced my own and others’ thinking on these matters, and I’ve been writing recently about Richard Bentley and the Dunciad Variorum and Scriblerian voices, not to mention regularly teaching Tom Jones and thinking with my students about the ways that novel’s intrusive authorial persona recapitulates and reforms aspects of the Scriblerian voice. But I would have to admit that there is something distinctly outdated about taking this on as the topic for a first book in eighteenth-century studies in the year 2016. The material might perhaps have been better presented as a series of articles focusing on the tighter and nar- rower version of Power’s argument that as classical epic finds its place in an age of consumerism, the metaphor of culinary taste and a new body of writing on modern cookery and gastronomy become not just incidental but intellectually central to the hybrid epic-novel’s new self-justifications, with Tom Jones representing the crucial centerpiece of the argument. It is a funny book, in good ways more than in bad—I was frankly captivated by Power’s observation that it “would be easy enough to fill a recipe book with things we know Swift loved” (he enumerates—all backed up by citations—custard, golden pippins, bacon and beans, stuffing, green tea, shoulder of mutton, fresh herrings, Seville oranges, wine mixed with small beer, and eighteen-penny chickens [p. 64])—but there remain hints of a scholar out of touch with the interests and methods of his own age cohort. Finally Power is concerned to differentiate Fielding’s mock scholarship from the mock-scholarly fusillades of Jonathan Swift and Pope: Fielding, Power persuasively shows, “is far more interested [than his gen- erational predecessors] in the imaginative and broadly satirical possibilities of the commentary” (p. 174). I am still not quite sure this material justifies publication as a freestanding monograph, but Power is a perceptive and immensely learned reader with a real feel for the internal contradictions and deep impulses of Fielding’s writing across his career. It’s a field outlier in the sense that it’s primarily about Ger- man literature and culture, but Christine Lehleiter has written a fascinating and illuminating book titled Romanticism, Origins, and the History of Heredity, published as the latest volume in Bucknell’s New Studies in the Age of Goethe series. This book’s topic (another subject I care about a great deal, having written an entire book on it) is the transition from “the assumption that nature provides the human being with a tabula rasa, free of all burdens of the past, to the nineteenth-century conviction that Jenny Davidson 689 the individual is biologically determined already at the moment of birth” (p. 1). By concentrating on changes in the notion of heredity between roughly 1760 and 1820, Lehleiter intends to chronicle “changes in the understanding of the individual’s relationship with the ancestors and its effects on the definition of the self” (p. 2). This large-scale tug of war between the promise of an individual’s developing independence and the threat to autonomy by way of biological conditions and limits is worked out partly as a set of arguments about the material basis for selfhood and identity, and Lehleiter follows that body of argument closely, investigating “the consequences of the idea that we are greatly shaped or even determined by our biological heritage”: “how is selfhood defined, and redefined,” she asks, “once it is suggested that the human being is determined by (and determines) biology?” (p. 5). Lehleiter examines a significant body of scientific writing on the formation of offspring and the inheritance of traits from one generation to the next, and she proves to be an extremely capable guide to this fascinating and (to the non-German-reading scholar) relatively inaccessible body of material. The literary-critical payoff to this cultural and intellectual history then comes when she turns to some of the canonical texts of German Romanticism, particularly Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s influential bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister, and individual chapters connect discussions of hybridiza- tion to the figure of the bastard in Jean Pau Richter’s Der Komet and questions of genealogy and origin (blood and trauma) in E. T. A. Hoffman’s Elixiere des Teufels. I found the links Lehleiter makes in her second chapter between an agricultural discourse on the benefits of inbreeding and the Mignon episode of Wilhelm Meister almost shocking in their novelty; I am not well equipped to evaluate how persuasive that argument ultimately is (Lehleiter suggests that by placing Mignon in this discourse and intellectual context, the novel gives the figure “epistemological significance as a hermaphrodite whose body rejects all attempts of reading” [p. 10], and a shorter version of the argument also appears in the collection of essays on generation described later in this review), but the book is a stimulating and gripping read throughout. Now to my category of theoretically driven monographs (Menely was the initial example above). Kelleher’s Making Love takes up consideration of “the mutually shaping relations between senti- mentalism and heterosexual desire in eighteenth-century Brit- ish literature and philosophy” (p. 1). Turning on its head John Addington Symonds’s late nineteenth-century suggestion that “‘a male who loves his own sex must be … incapable of humane 690 Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century or generous sentiments,’” Kelleher identifies a sexual ideology that runs as follows: “it is the common belief that a male or female who loves someone of the opposite sex must be capable of humane or generous sentiments. The intellectual wager of this book is that the pathologization of homosexuality has been enacted, to a great extent, through what might be called the col- lateral moral disqualification of same-sex desire” (pp. 1–2). How did eighteenth-century writers “reimagin[e] heterosexual desire as a form of moral sensibility”? How did heterosexual desire be- come a source, sometimes even “the very precondition—of moral goodness and ethical sociability” (p. 2)? Building on earlier work on the relationship between sentimentalism and sexuality by Nancy Armstrong, G. J. Barker-Benfield, and Claudia L. John- son, Kelleher singles out for emphasis “the dynamic interplay of literary innovation and philosophical speculation in the history of sexuality,” contending “that eighteenth-century literature and phi- losophy fundamentally rewrote the ethical relationship between self and other as heterosexual fiction, as the sentimental story in which the desire, pleasure, and love shared by man and woman become synonymous with the affective virtues of moral goodness … Feeling desire, falling in love, getting married, and raising a family become, in the hands of these authors, the privileged—and highly pleasurable—means for overcoming the psychological and emotional limits of self-love and for developing a moral sensibility attuned to the thoughts and feelings of others” (p. 8). As Kelleher pursues his suggestive argument through a constellation of writ- ings that includes the Earl of Shaftesbury’s Characteristics, the Tatler and the Spectator, Love in Excess, Pamela, and Tom Jones, the influence of Michel Foucault remains very strong, to slightly constraining and at times actively claustrophobic effect. This seemed to me particularly the case both in Kelleher’s discussion of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele and in his account of Rich- ardson’s “disciplining” of Pamela’s energies as he repurposes them “toward the narrative horizon of heterosexual desire” (p. 151). The other book I placed mentally in the same category is De- Gabriele’s Sovereign Power and the Enlightenment. DeGabriele takes up the problem of the “confrontation between sovereign and subject in political modernity” as it was first formulated by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (p. xv). Following Derrida, Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and others in their attentiveness to the problem of the subject under Hobbes’s model of sovereignty, DeGabriele hews to a tradition that is fundamentally heterodox both to civic republican and to liberal narratives about politics and the public Jenny Davidson 691 sphere: he foregrounds a set of texts that “address the analytics of sovereign power from outside the perspective of a hegemonic liberalism” (p. xvii). These texts promise us, DeGabriele argues, the possibility of developing “a concept of the political that is not reducible to indivisible sovereign power,” with the genres of the novel and Enlightenment history, precisely because they probe “the limits of their own representative strategies,” offering “a perspective on the rise of political modernity that is distinct from that found in formal political philosophy” (p. xviii). These statements of the book’s argument are at times off-puttingly abstract, not to mention embedded in a specific intellectual context and vocabulary that to me is quite foreign or perhaps just overly ideological (“we need to ask how the material or me- chanical subject can avoid being captured by, or becoming a tool of, sovereign power” [p. xxi]), but I found DeGabriele’s readings of novels stimulating and often persuasive. The accounts the book provides of Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year and Clarissa are especially perceptive. Defoe’s account, DeGabriele argues, “shows that survival is about the persistence of matter, as much as it is about the survival of persons,” while Clarissa’s survival takes place because of an “impropriety of Clarissa’s own body … that makes it impossible for a violent, sovereign touch to sub- due her body through the formal mechanism of consent that is the foundation of the liberal social contract and the patriarchal marriage contract,” with the implication that “consent, and thus contractual form, is an inadequate mechanism for the construc- tion of a coherent political field” (p. xxii). The underlying intel- lectual rationale motivating these readings, as well as readings of historical narratives by Hume, Gibbon, and others, probably originates in Derrida’s injunction that political thought should be given “the task of limiting ‘a logic of nation-state sovereignty’” (p. xxxiii)—a task that DeGabriele believes “was already underway in eighteenth-century literature.” The conclusion more explicitly positions his own argument against Amanda Anderson’s recent critique of “the focus on sovereign exceptionality” in Agamben and others; Anderson’s call for “a renewed promotion of political liberalism, and the ideals of communicative reason, transparency, and normativity that go along with it” (p. 140) may resonate with the forms of the nineteenth-century novel, DeGabriele suggests, but “the eighteenth-century novel does not conform to this liberal paradigm” (p. 141). The book concludes with a resounding tribute to the ways that the potentialities of the eighteenth-century novel resurface in literary narratives like Freud’s case histories and 692 Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century J. M. Coetzee’s fake autobiographies, testimony “to the continuing power of the critique performed by the eighteenth-century novel, even after the construction of the twin hegemonies of literary realism and political liberalism” (p. 142). (I pause here to note that the spread of graduate programs that trained the scholars who have written the books I’ve been discussing is very much what I would have imagined: in the order I have discussed them, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, UCLA, the University of Virginia, Rutgers, Indiana, Princeton, SUNY Buf- falo. Chicago, Yale, and NYU would have made an appearance in other recent years, though I haven’t investigated the data more systematically, and such a list gives a good guide to those of us who are steering recent undergraduates toward doctoral study in eighteenth-century British literature, albeit with some significant lag time built in.) Limits of space and time prevent me from giving detailed ac- counts of the other works I’ve grouped under the heading of the first book, but all of the books I will now list represent valuable scholarly contributions and would make useful additions to library collections. Lisa Walters’s Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Science, and Politics offers a comprehensive account of Cavendish’s writ- ings based on the premise that tensions between Cavendish’s feminist affinities and her royalist politics have been greatly over- stated in the existing critical literature. Walters sets out to show that republican perspectives inform a good deal of Cavendish’s thought, and the book’s first three chapters explore the ways in which “Cavendish’s political theory does not conform to royalist assumptions about monarchy and social order,” while the final chapter considers “how the politics of Cavendish’s romances may closely resemble attitudes common among parliamentarian critics of the Crown following the execution of Charles I” (p. 10). Hannah Lavery’s The Impotency Poem from Ancient Latin to Restoration English Literature offers a useful overview of the long history of the genre and concludes with a very clear sequence of chapters that will be of special interest to readers of Restoration and early eighteenth-century literature: the first of these considers the resurgence of the “imperfect enjoyment” poem, in the hands of George Etherege, the Earl of Rochester, and Aphra Behn, in the early years of the Restoration; the second treats the anonymous imperfect enjoyment poems that appeared in roughly the same period; and the final chapter considers William Wycherley’s use of motifs of impotence in The Country Wife (1675) and the poems of his Miscellany. Patrick Reilly’s Bills of Mortality: Disease and Jenny Davidson 693 Destiny in Plague Literature from Early Modern to Postmodern Times similarly tells the long history of a genre (or perhaps “mode” is the better term here). Only the chapter on Journal of the Plague Year falls strictly under the rubric of our field priorities (chapters proceed from Defoe to The Betrothed, Death in Venice, The Plague, and Angels in America), but I am always heartened to see an academic book take an expansive chronological view and a wide perspective on literature, not least because I think it bet- ter corresponds with how we teach literature to undergraduates and with ways of illuminating literature to a broader readership than the forms of period-based specialization with which we are most familiar. Diana Solomon’s Prologues and Epilogues of Restoration Theater: Gender and Comedy, Performance and Print creates a “gendered taxonomy” of prologues and epilogues in the printed plays of the period, then proceeds to consider the impact of such paratexts in two specific cases: first, Anne Bracegirdle’s power- ful manipulation of contradictions between the bawdiness of her self-performance in prologues and epilogues and the strikingly virginal cast of the parts she tended to play in main pieces; and second, the vicissitudes of the lewd epilogue Addison composed for Anne Oldfield to perform in Ambrose Philips’s The Distrest Mother, which was singled out for opprobrium by Pamela Andrews and praised by Samuel Johnson as the greatest epilogue ever writ- ten. The book’s introduction is clear, thorough, and interesting, and would make an excellent overview to assign to undergradu- ates in a course interested in how we understand the prologues and epilogues that are often printed in teaching editions of the period’s plays (or indeed sometimes omitted from them) without much explanation or annotation. Helen E. M. Brooks’s Actresses, Gender, and the Eighteenth-Century Stage: Playing Women is also written in an admirably clear and accessible style, beginning with the premise that critical discussions of this period, by foreground- ing an implicit dichotomy between bourgeois respectability on the one hand and prostitution on the other, have overemphasized the scandalous or transgressive nature of actresses’ roles in life and on the stage in eighteenth-century Britain by contrasting those roles with a model of bourgeois femininity that would only come into being some decades later. Brooks chooses instead to foreground a much wider scope of interactions between female performance on stage and the highly variable and rapidly changing set of models of femininity that circulated in the culture around it. 694 Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century My final pair of first books both address the relationship between women writers and a discrete topic or problem. Laura E. Thomason’s The Matrimonial Trap: Eighteenth-Century Women Writers Redefine Marriage opens by laying out the case that mar- riage was undergoing a sort of crisis in the eighteenth century and promising to explore “ways in which women used writing to shape their marriages according to their wishes and ways in which they constructed and criticized matrimony both before and after their own marriages” (pp. 2–3). The introduction offers a good overview of the historical and legal background, bringing in relevant liter- ary examples when it is appropriate; individual chapters treat the writings of Dorothy Osborne, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Hester Mulso Chapone, and Mary Granville Delany before turning to fic- tional depictions of marriage by Sarah Scott and Eliza Haywood. The book’s afterword first explains why Clarissa struck such a chord with contemporary female readers in its depiction of the potentialities and hazards of the marital relationship and then considers Pride and Prejudice as representing a much softened and mitigated version of the marital rigors experienced by many of the real historical eighteenth-century women the book has been interested in. Finally JoEllen DeLucia’s A Feminine Enlightenment: British Women Writers and the Philosophy of Progress, 1759–1820 offers a fresh and engaging account of the role played by women writers and readers in a genealogy of Enlightenment thought that is often considered not just predominantly but almost exclusively masculine. DeLucia begins by exploring a set of letters written by Elizabeth Montagu to Lord Kames; Montagu offers a series of reflections on progress and addresses the impact of women on modern conceptions of sensibility and sociability by way of com- mentaries on the writing not just of Kames himself, but also of Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, David Hume, Hugh Blair, and so forth. This correspondence makes explicit, DeLucia points out, “the largely invisible contributions to Enlightenment thought” (p. 3) of certain British women writers, and the book takes up the project of reconsidering women writers’ responses to Enlighten- ment thought with a particular interest in their commentary on its highly gendered analysis of historical progress. She is especially interested in the responses of female authors of “sentimental” fiction and poetry, Anna Seward for instance, to the aspect of Scottish Enlightenment thought that identified modern refine- ment or politeness as being a consequence of increasing contact between men and women. Other literary texts of particular inter- est to DeLucia include Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, Jenny Davidson 695 which she argues produces “an uneven and non-linear feminist historiography capable of producing unconventional accounts of women’s experiences of British imperial and commercial growth” (p. 13), and the novels of the Minerva Press, some of which she says represent “fictional adaptations of the multi-stage historical method developed during the Scottish Enlightenment” (p. 14). THE SCHOLARLY BOOK AT MIDCAREER AND BEYOND The cost of spending so much time and space on first books is that I now have less wherewithal to give very full treatment to monographs by scholars later in their careers. I have, I think, thirteen of those in front of me, a strikingly diverse group of books. Marilyn Butler’s Mapping Mythologies: Countercurrents in Eighteenth-Century British Poetry and Cultural History represents the belated publication of the typescript of a book completed in 1984 and found in Butler’s papers when she became too ill to con- tinue working. The book includes chapters on James Macpherson and Thomas Chatterton, Mark Akenside and Thomson, Thomas Gray and William Collins, and English and Welsh popular anti- quarianism. Butler’s focus is “on a series of writers who saw the poet as maker of history, often in a peculiarly literal sense” (p. xvii). Heather Glen’s excellent introduction concludes by observ- ing that the book “is ‘dated,’ both in the sense that the works to which it makes reference were all written before 1984—and also more positively and provocatively, in its bold historical sweep and clarity of argument,” and suggesting that external career and funding pressures have encouraged academic publications to move toward the model of “the exhaustively argued essay or monograph on a specialized topic.” In this context, Glen rightly says, Mapping Mythologies is “an inspiration and an example. Not driven by a ‘good idea,’ or the pursuit of opportunity, but by wide reading and deep reflection, it reminds us of the kind of bold thinking that years spent in historical scholarship can make possible” (pp. xxiv–xxv). The cover beautifully reproduces one of William Blake’s illustrations for Gray’s poem “The Bard.” Butler comments trenchantly, regarding Gray’s translations of Welsh poetry, that “[s]ince 1800 academics have proved slow to recog- nize important ideas unless they appear in nonfictional prose at book length. This is unfortunate for the later reputations of Eng- lish intellectuals writing in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in a society in which ideas circulated indiscriminately by means of poems, plays, novels, essays and even reviews” (p. 696 Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century 85)—a period, I might add, in which a form like the diary or the commonplace book might provide an equivocally public-private venue for and mode of literary composition with its own set of conventions and its own peculiar advantages in the way of the traction provided on ideas and arguments. Mark Philp’s Reforming Ideas in Britain: Politics and Language in the Shadow of the French Revolution, 1789–1815 is not a monograph but rather a collection of essays published over sev- eral decades and supplemented here by three new chapters that round out the topic and give the book something of the feeling of a sustained argument. The single most essential essay for me is the exceptionally thoughtful “Godwin, Thelwall, and the Means of Progress,” which insists on the complexities and ambiguities surrounding what is often (mis)characterized as a clear polariza- tion “between reformers and reactionaries in the opening salvos of the [revolution] discussion” (p. 212): “Even if attitudes to France and the opening events of its revolution did become increasingly polarised, especially after the September Massacres of 1792,” Philp writes, “this was only one dimension of the controversy, and those who contributed to it did not line up systematically in a way that allows us to identify a fundamental fault line running through the polity” (p. 212). Philp’s reading “places Godwin in the centre of the debate on France, not in the sense that he was the major contributor, but in the sense that what became a set of polaris- ing forces around him increasingly left him with a position that was both sympathetic to and critical of Burke and Paine and that he occupied more uneasily as the debate became progressively a pamphlet and print war. Godwin’s response to Thelwall was a response to his sense that he was facing a dual extremism—both of the government in its panic, and the reformers, who shut their eyes and ‘believe, while everything is auspicious, that everything is desperate’” (p. 227). The other essay I was especially happy to see made newly accessible here is “Politics and Memory: Nelson and Trafalgar in Popular Song,” which aside from its other merits would make an excellent teaching tool in the context of an article or dissertation workshop for graduate students interested in thinking about how exploring a less well-known archive can lead to the creation of interesting original scholarship. The book here of broadest interest may be Lothar Müller’s White Magic: The Age of Paper. It doesn’t quite have the uncanny magical quality of, say, Alberto Manguel’s books on the history of reading, but it is extraordinarily gripping and erudite on every page. As well as being a history of paper, it is really a book about Jenny Davidson 697 “what modern European literature knows about the material from which it is made” (p. xii). Goethe is the presiding literary inspiration—we learn that the German word Blatt, meaning leaf, sheet, or page, appears over 3,000 times in Goethe’s works, very often referring to a sheet of paper (p. 85)—but Müller writes extremely well if necessarily briefly about Miguel de Cervantes, Defoe, Richardson, Sterne, Honoré de Balzac, Dickens, Herman Melville, and many others as well. There is something to delight or inform on every page here, whether it concerns the invention of the media of modern bureaucracy in Spain under Philip II, the way papermaking—“[t]he transformation of a base, contemptible material into a snowy white writing surface”—fits neatly “with the religious schema of the purification and conversion of humanity’s corrupted nature” (p. 50), Hans Christian Andersen’s obsession with the art of paper cutting, or the importance of the punch card to William Gaddis. In Literature Incorporated: The Cultural Unconscious of the Business Corporation, 1650–1850, John O’Brien tells the story of the figure of the corporation over two centuries in the English- speaking world. He begins by observing that the corporation is “a historical entity, a creature of law and a vehicle for commerce, and also [an] imaginative construct”: “The corporation is a fiction that not only informs other fictions but also has gained autonomy and power on its own right in the world” (p. 1). The book is writ- ten out of our own period of financial crisis, and is elegantly and economically narrated; it represents an excellent instance of what can be done when a literary historian tackles a clearly defined but also profoundly consequential topic at the intersec- tion of literary and cultural history. Steve Mentz is a scholar of early modern literature, but Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization, 1550–1719 has a good deal to offer readers in the long eighteenth century as well. The book identifies a constitu- tive “shipwreck modernity” that finds expression in a series of narratives that include “three elements that together comprise a shipwreck as recognizable literary microgenre: melodramatic pre- sentation, epistemological crisis, and recuperative metaphysics,” features which together also “allegorize shipwreck as a master topos for cultural change. The story begins by performing the radical break, deepens the crisis through physical and conceptual instability, and then often concludes with a tantalizing promise of Providential recuperation, in this world or the next. This three- stage formula presents a picture of cultural transformation richer than the simple binary of the break” (p. xxx). Using a wide range 698 Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century of sources, Mentz ultimately calls for a “blue humanities,” a hu- manities of the deep sea, attentive to ecologies both literary and meteorological. Less wide-ranging in its intellectual ambitions but also concerned with a world defined by an ocean is Juliet Shields’s Nation and Migration: The Making of British Atlantic Lit- erature, 1765–1835. Shields “extends the methods of archipelagic criticism across the Atlantic to bring to light hitherto-neglected connections between British and American literary cultures and to explore a body of writing that belongs neither to the British archipelago nor to the United States, but rather to the Atlantic world” (p. 5). She ties together a wide range of literary texts into a rich and fascinating canon—one chapter, for instance, “explores the transatlantic creation of the myth of the successful Scottish migrant” by first pairing Johnson’s Journey to the Western Is- lands of Scotland and J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer before considering James Fenimore Cooper’s employment, in The Last of the Mohicans, of “the myth of the successful Scottish migrant together with the conven- tions of Walter Scott’s Waverley novels to imagine an American identity formed through cultural rather than racial mixing” (p. 14). The book’s primary aim, Shields points out in an epilogue, “has been to decenter the Anglo-American focus of transatlantic literary studies by extending the reach of archipelagic criticism to include the literature of the early American republic” (p. 139). Finally, Richard Frohock’s Buccaneers and Privateers: The Story of the English Sea Rover, 1675–1725 is necessarily narrower in its concerns, but tells a rousing story and will be of use to scholars working in and around this area. In Poetical Dust: Poets’ Corner and the Making of Britain, Thomas A. Prendergast examines the history of that corner of Westminster Abbey as “a space that looks to the losses of the past, but also offers the potential for imagining the nation in the future … by acting as a text that calls forth a certain affective response from its visitor—akin to the affective response that lit- erature calls forth from the reader” (p. xiii). In Touché: The Duel in Literature, John Leigh provides a highly engaging literary history of the thing—“DUEL”—defined in Gustave Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas with the following phrases: “‘Thunder against it. Not a proof of courage. Prestige of the man who has had a duel’”: “The final sentence,” observes Leigh, “empties the first two of all their force,” and “[t]he contradictions in this little huddle of lazy assertions are highly characteristic of the responses provoked by dueling in the previous two centuries” (p. 1). Of special interest Jenny Davidson 699 to the readership of SEL will be the chapter on what Leigh calls “the poignant duel,” which covers the role of the duel in Clarissa, Julie, and Les liaisons dangereuses. “I was first surprised then delighted and, at length, almost dismayed by the incidence of so many fictional duels,” Leigh admits at the end of the introduction. “They constitute a pervasive, persistent phenomenon in European literary culture” (p. 18). Christopher R. Miller’s Surprise: The Poetics of the Unexpected from Milton to Austen is both learned and subtle, and yet its man- ner provoked in me some degree of impatience insofar as it offers an insistently dry account of a topic notable for its affective and somatic force. Miller’s own description of the book is almost too scholarly, too responsible in its balanced account of what it lays out to do—“I argue that surprise acquired a complex set of mean- ings during this time, and that a thoroughgoing attention to those meanings illuminates important concerns about the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of literature, especially the novel” (p. 2). I am not sure that I agree with Miller that “[i]n its sheer brevity, ordinariness, and endless iterability, surprise might be called the signature emotion of the novel” (p. 5)—I would think a stronger case could be made for shame or loss, and Miller’s account, though erudite throughout and sometimes quite brilliant, didn’t always or ultimately leave me convinced. Timothy Erwin’s Textual Vision: Augustan Design and the Invention of Eighteenth-Century British Culture takes up the term “image”—introduced in the eighteenth century, in a sense something like how we now use it, by Blair’s influential Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783)—and gives its longer, more complicated history: “For many readers the terms ‘image’ and ‘imagery’ are shorthand for textual vision across the genres,” Erwin writes, “and that is precisely the view that I would like to complicate. What other kinds of word pictures have appealed to the mind’s eye historically?” (p. 3). The two final books I have placed under this heading represent opposite extremes of a spectrum from the modest to the monu- mental. Elizabeth R. Napier’s Defoe’s Major Fiction: Accounting for the Self represents a kind of book that I believe is currently under- rated in the academy: it is a modest but perceptive and sometimes quite powerful monograph on Defoe’s first-person fictions in terms of what they reveal about narrative and the construction of the self. This topic has the gift of being both simple and apt—I often wish that literary scholarship had a stronger sense of salience, of wanting to say what is important and true, as opposed to fore- grounding things that nobody has ever thought of in this way be- 700 Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century fore. The latter mode is all very well in cases of genuine discovery, but will tend to encourage scholars to produce readings that are overingenious or even sometimes actively misleading in their em- phasis. Napier’s decision to defend, in response to an “increasing tendency to view Defoe’s fiction in terms of materiality,” the value of engaging “those questions of identity, agency, and morality that play an overt and explicit role in his art” seems to me hugely important (p. xxvii), and Napier writes well and persuasively both about the fictions themselves and about what light they cast on how and when “inwardness and interiority begin … to comprise the subject matter of the novel” (p. xii). At the opposite end of the spectrum, Jan Alber’s Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama also has a number of praiseworthy qualities that are absent from many of the books of criticism we publish in the Anglo-American academic mainstream: Alber pursues his topic—the premise that “throughout literary history, the story- worlds of novels, short stories, and plays teem with ‘unnatural’ (i.e., physically, logically, or humanly impossible) scenarios and events that challenge our real-world knowledge” (p. 3)—across an immensely wide-ranging and multinational literary canon from the Old English epic through postmodernism (p. 7). His discussion of eighteenth-century object narratives is especially interesting, and he touches regularly on works such as Moll Flanders and Gulliver’s Travels, which he connects to twentieth-century literature in ways that I find admirable and often quite suggestive. EDITED COLLECTIONS I have never been a huge enthusiast for the genre of the edited collection. I like best the ones that are loosely arranged around a significant major theme or topic with the essays solicited from prominent scholars in the field: this sometimes then means that the individual contributions are less research articles and more general overviews of the topic, but that tradeoff often augments the volume’s utility and longevity. In some simplistic sense, I sup- pose, I still prefer for a conventional research article or essay to appear in a journal rather than a standalone edited collection—the peer-review procedure is more reliably robust, though of course there are exceptions (but tenure committees will believe it to be so), and individual pieces are more likely to be available digitally as PDFs. (This may change in coming years, and the Cambridge Companion volumes already represent a very valuable exception.) I also think that especially for an untenured scholar, the amount Jenny Davidson 701 of work required to edit and properly introduce such a collection is often or perhaps even usually better spent on other endeavors: editing a special issue of a journal, for instance, will often mean getting more help from a managing editor and piggybacking on the journal’s ordinary procedures for reviewing and revising articles. The real trouble is that only a small proportion of such collections will become “canonical,” as it were. A good example of success in this genre comes in a volume, rereleased this year in hardcover by Bucknell, that I think represents essentially the best-case scenario for the edited collection of literary criticism that is organized not for a series or as primarily a teaching tool but as the best way of compiling a field’s state of knowledge on an emerging topic: I am thinking here of the excellent The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England, edited by Mark Blackwell and originally published in 2007, which re- mains an indispensable resource for scholars working on a host of topics related to the it-narrative and the animated objects of eighteenth-century literature. I would identify in this group three author-organized collec- tions that do promise to hold their value on the shelves of an undergraduate research collection as well as in the stacks of a research library. In Lord Rochester in the Restoration World, editors Matthew C. Augustine and Steven N. Zwicker have assembled a valuable sequence of contributions on Rochester and his contexts; I especially enjoyed Paul Davis’s “From Script to Print: Marketing Rochester,” Tom Jones’s essay on Rochester and the poetics of obscenity, and Tom Lockwood’s brilliant discussion of Roches- ter and rhyme, but there is much more here as well to engage the attention of readers with even a remote degree of interest in Rochester’s writings. Anniversary Essays on Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock,” edited by Donald W. Nichol, includes new essays by distinguished scholars on Pope’s great poem, including an unusual essay by Kate Scarth that is based on an interview with Sophie Gee about her novel The Scandal of the Season and its relationship with Pope’s authorizing poem. The editor’s preface provides a valuable account of the poem’s somewhat complicated publication history, which is also treated thoughtfully and with illuminating effect by Allison Muri, Nichol, and several other contributors elsewhere in the volume. Nicholas Hudson’s essay on intersections between Catholic society and commodity cul- ture also struck me as an especially fresh and valuable account of some relatively little-explored dimensions of the poem and its backgrounds. Sterne, Tristram, Yorick: Tercentenary Essays on 702 Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century Laurence Sterne, edited by Melvyn New, Peter de Voogd, and Ju- dith Hawley, is a bit more uneven in its contributions. The volume derives from a tercentenary conference held at Royal Holloway, University of London in July 2013, and the essays are meant to “exhibit some of the defining features both of the conference and of Sterne studies at this moment” (p. vii). The collection opens with a bang: Thomas Keymer, in an essay titled “Small Particles of Fame: Subjectivity, Celebrity, Sterne,” sets out to reappraise and contextualize Sterne’s games with subjectivity (p. 6). Keymer lays out a vision of the novel “as the attempt of an ailing memoirist— a memoirist free of Humean scruples about the vanity of life- writing, though increasingly desperate for success as his project unfolds—to fix his identity in print before death intervenes … Like Hume in the Treatise, though with none of the same clarity of recognition, Sterne’s hapless narrator fails to articulate the simple, continuous selfhood he seeks, and finds himself caught instead in a potentially endless riot of transitory perceptions” (p. 11). Another standout essay is Stephanie DeGooyer’s fascinating account of identity documents in “The Poetics of the Passport in A Sentimental Journey.” I will now point to three volumes that offer even more exciting potential to shape future scholarship. Each of these three holds the promise achieved by The Secret Life of Things, of becoming the canonical critical account of a topic newly interesting to the field, and the quality of the contributions is consistently high in all three collections. Edited by Daniel Cook and Nicholas Seager, The Afterlives of Eighteenth-Century Fiction is a thrilling read for those of us who are interested in questions of adaptation, theatri- cal and otherwise. Cook’s own essay “On Authorship, Appropria- tion, and Eighteenth-Century Fiction” offers an excellent overview of the topic in introduction, and is clear and exhaustive enough that I am tempted to add it to the syllabus for my undergraduate history of the novel course, but the volume is packed full of fresh and fascinating contributions. The one that captivated me most of all was Peter Sabor’s “Refashioning The History of England: Jane Austen and 1066 and All That.” The obvious source for 1066 and All That was Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall’s Our Island Story: A History of England for Boys and Girls (1905), but Sabor persuasively assembles a case that Austen’s satirical history of England represents a previously unmentioned influence or model. The bibliography provided at the end of this volume will also be invaluable to students and scholars researching adaptation; there is much here that is new to me, and I have made a special note Jenny Davidson 703 to seek out Christina Lupton and Peter McDonald’s coauthored essay on early novels and recent video games, which appeared in Mosaic in 2010. Chris Mounsey has put together what seems to me an important and thought-provoking collection (the title is perhaps not as compelling as the book itself—Developments in the Histories of Sexualities: In Search of the Normal, 1600–1800) that pushes back against the influence of Foucault in queer theory and dominant histories of sexuality with the goal of re- cuperating “the body and its desires” (p. vii). Graduate students embarking on research in gender and sexuality studies in the long eighteenth century should be encouraged to read the collection in its entirety; George Haggerty’s opening reconsideration of the history of homosexuality will be of particular interest. Finally, in The Secrets of Generation: Reproduction in the Long Eighteenth Century, Raymond Stephanson and Darren N. Wagner have per- suaded an extraordinarily knowledgeable and interesting set of contributors to cover a huge range of topics concerning genera- tion and reproduction in the period. It is interdisciplinary and multinational in its interests and emphasis, and it represents the very best of what can be done in the way of simultaneously assessing the state of a field and aggregating original research by some of the most interesting scholars working in the humanities today. The collection is full of gems, but Wagner’s own essay “A Bit Exposed: Displays of Male Genitals” may have been the single most informative and startling piece here, and it would make a memorable addition to a syllabus touching on questions about bodies and anatomy in the period. Next I will single out three high-quality volumes that will prob- ably be of more interest to historians than to literary scholars, though there is much here of relevance to scholars working on these specific topics. Edited by David Norbrook, Stephen Har- rison, and Philip Hardie, Lucretius and the Early Modern origi- nates in a conference on the same topic held by Oxford’s Centre for Early Modern Studies in May 2012. Michael Meranze and Saree Makdisi’s Imagining the British Atlantic after the American Revolution emerges from a Clark Library conference cosponsored with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth– and Eighteenth-Century Studies and takes up “the intersection between … Atlantic and Revolutionary historiographies” (p. 8), charting “not only the dy- namic upheavals of the British Revolutionary Atlantic, but their inner blockages as well” (p. 18). “In important ways,” the editors conclude their introduction, “it is these multiplicities and antino- mies that continue to haunt us the most: the revolutionary British 704 Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century Atlantic did not mark the political or social threshold of modernity in a clean way as a neat, even cauterized, cutting off of the past, but the articulation of a series of inconsistent and often contra- dictory projects” (p. 18). I take special note of Iain McCalman’s fascinating essay “Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg’s Romantic Retreat: Magic, Mesmerism, and Prophecy, 1776–1802,” which gave me a distinctly unfamiliar perspective on one artist’s retreat from politics in the 1790s. Finally, Porscha Fermanis and John Regan’s Rethinking British Romantic History, 1770–1845, which emerges from a conference on Romantic historiography held at University College Dublin in the summer of 2010, sets out “not only to reconcile ‘aesthetic’ and ‘historicist’ positions in literary studies by considering the ways in which we might shed new light on the relationship between style, form, and content in the his- torical writing of the period between 1770 and 1845, but also to integrate literary texts (and their critical history) within scholarly developments in historical studies” (p. 4). Greg Kucich’s “The His- tory Girls: Charlotte Smith’s History of England and the Politics of Women’s Educational History” provides a strong start to the volume, which also concludes with an absolute standout essay by Claire Connolly, “A Bookish History of Irish Romanticism,” which considers the common ground of Irish Romantic novels and the antiquarianism of the same period, both of which “imagine an overflowing cultural bounty that is stored within manuscript and print media, and concern themselves with questions of collection, copying, collation, and transmission” (p. 271). She is interested in “the special role of footnotes in the Irish Romantic novel”: “Novels which themselves were for a long time considered ‘as imitative footnotes to a broadly English culture’ made a special art of the use of paratextual material,” she says, with such notes not working as devices of alienation so much as offering “a mediated form of intimacy, bringing readers into proximity with a palpable community of knowledge, derived from an array of sources and preserved in print” (pp. 272–3). The next group of volumes contain a good deal of value but seem less coherent or less conclusive in their logic and in the traction they offer on a topic of contemporary concern. In Impas- sioned Jurisprudence: Law, Literature, and Emotion, 1760–1848, editor Nancy E. Johnson has assembled an intriguing volume of essays whose authors consider the role of emotion in eighteenth- century English legal theory, finding “that feeling, sentiment, and passion are integral to juridical thought as well as legislation” (p. ix). Simon Stern’s opening essay “Blackstone’s Legal Actors: The Jenny Davidson 705 Passions of a Rational Jurist” and Johnson’s own piece “Narra- tive Sentiment in Adam Smith’s Lectures on Jurisprudence” both represent very strong contributions to the topic, but the rest of the volume is more uneven, so that, for instance, while I greatly enjoyed reading Peter de Bolla’s “The Madness of Sovereignty: George III and the Known Unknown of Torture,” I was not per- suaded that it developed the volume’s themes at anything other than a superficial level. Edited by A. D. Cousins and Geoffrey Payne, Home and Nation in British Literature from the English to the French Revolutions covers an unusually long historical span and sets out “to present broadly focused accounts of what was at stake when contemporary writers debated the homeland: what it was, and what it should be; who threatened it, and who were truly upholding it … [and] what was at issue when writers likewise debated the concept of home: what constituted it, or what should; whether it remained secure or was under threat from problems affecting the homeland as a whole; how domestic economy mirrored that of the homeland; where its future lay; what classical or Christian models were most relevant to it” (p. 11). The premise is that “the actuality of revolution—or fear of it” threatened the very conception of home, making “the domestic a microcosm of the debates over national concerns” (p. 11). British Women and the Intellectual World in the Long Eighteenth Century, edited by Teresa Barnard (it is a volume in the series British Literature in Context in the Long Eighteenth Century, edited by Jack Lynch and published by Ashgate, but I do not know what the future holds for that series in the wake of Ashgate’s closure), explores some of the “strategic ways” in which women “employed their knowledge to participate in the intellectual world” even as the sex’s “capacity to reason remained a contentious issue” (p. 2). Citizens of the World: Adapting in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Kevin L. Cope and Samara Anne Cahill, derives from a conference of the same name organized in 2012 by the South Central Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies in conjunction with Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. The opening essay, David Fairer’s “‘All manag’d for the best’: Ecology and the Dynamics of Adaptation,” presents a superb account of internal tensions within the concept of adaptation in the long eighteenth century in Britain. Romanticism, Rousseau, Switzerland: New Prospects, edited by Angela Esterhammer, Diane Piccitto, and Patrick Vincent, is an installment in Palgrave’s series Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Cultures of Print. There are a number of brilliant essays here (of particular interest to 706 Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century me was Nicola J. Watson’s “Rousseau on the Tourist Trail”) but the topic seems to me too loosely conceived to cohere in terms of producing much greater traction on questions and sources. One especially valuable motivation for an edited collection is the festschrift model, the honoring of a distinguished scholar on the occasion of a retirement in the form of a volume of essays by friends, students, and colleagues. There are two substantial contributions in this vein this year. The first is Women, Gender, and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Essays in Memory of Betty Rizzo, edited by Temma Berg and Sonia Kane. The col- lection originated in a roundtable held in honor of Rizzo at the East-Central American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Georgetown in 2008 (Nora Nachumi served as moderator and Kathryn Temple was the program chair). There are some very good essays here, and I particularly enjoyed the opening se- quence of pieces on the eighteenth-century novel: the collection begins with Toni Bowers discussing the question of the tone of Richardson’s Clarissa, asking what one studies “when studying a novel’s tone” and what we can “learn from an examination of tone that we have not already learned from studies of a novel’s form, or narrative structure, or plot” (p. 4). Berg’s introduction and Beverly Schneller’s closing piece (“Parting Thoughts on the Brilliant Career of a Master Teacher-Scholar”) beautifully bring to life Rizzo’s scholarly career and the immense generosity with which she helped students, especially female students, to achieve meaningful careers. The second is Editing Lives: Essays in Con- temporary Textual and Biographical Studies in Honor of O M Brack Jr., edited by Jesse G. Swan and including a number of personal reminiscences and tributes as well as some significant academic contributions, such as Sabor’s translation of Frances Burney’s fascinating French-language account of her own association with Hester Thrale Piozzi. Finally, I should mention four edited volumes of considerable distinction that are constituted rather differently than these oth- ers and really properly deserve their own category. I am delighted to have a copy of volume 2 of the Oxford History of the Novel in English, English and British Fiction, 1750–1820, edited by Peter Garside and Karen O’Brien. This volume on its own already rep- resents an incredible resource for scholars, but limits of space will prevent me from saying much more than that. In addition to contributions on book production and distribution by James Raven, Garside, and David Allan, and on major authors and tradi- tions spanning topics from the novelty of Sterne (James Chandler) Jenny Davidson 707 to the national tale (Claire Connolly) and the historical Romance (Ina Ferris), the editors conceived of an imaginative heading that runs simply “Generic Variations and Narrative Structures,” under which they have clustered four of the most interesting and illumi- nating pieces in the entire collection: Lynn Festa on it-narratives and spy novels, Ros Ballaster on philosophical and Oriental tales, Nicola J. Watson on epistolary fiction, and Clara Tuite on celeb- rity and scandal fiction. The Cambridge Companion to Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–1789, edited by Catherine Ingrassia, and The Cambridge Companion to Women’s Writing in the Romantic Period, edited by Devoney Looser, together represent a superb new resource for teachers and researchers alike. The second came to my hands so late that I have only briefly looked through it, and will have to come back to it at a more leisurely moment; the earlier volume in the sequence certainly represents a standard of excellence for this sort of volume that I suspect the later will also live up to. Ingrassia’s introduction provides an extremely valuable overview of the “recovery project of women writers” of the past three decades (p. 1), noting that such “efforts of recovery and recuperation bring the current generation of scholars and students to the point where they can use the rigorous skills of biography, textual studies, and emergent theoretical approaches to complicate existing and formulate new, more precise narratives that further advance the understanding of women writers” (p. 9), and the guide to further reading at the end of the volume is also particularly strong. Finally, though it stands out as anomalous in this library of books without many pictures, Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination, edited by Dale Townshend, represents the catalog for an extraordinary exhibition of more than a hundred and fifty objects at the British Library. The story runs all the way from the eighteenth century (Horace Walpole is well represented here, and so is Mary Godwin Shelley) to the present day, with the Gothic ramifications of Angela Carter’s stories and Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves providing an evocative endpoint to a richly illustrated story of books and their arousal of readers’ darkest emotions. PAPERBACK REISSUES, ANNUALS, SPECIAL ISSUES It is heartening to see so many paperback releases of books I already know and admire; I don’t know that these are sent to the journal for review on so systematic a basis as the new books, but I would single out for special attention these four initially: John 708 Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century Richetti’s The Life of Daniel Defoe for the Blackwell Critical Biog- raphy series; G. Gabrielle’s Starr’s influential Lyric Generations: Poetry and the Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century; Kathleen Lubey’s Excitable Imaginations: Eroticism and Reading in Britain, 1660–1760, whose stated goal of bringing “the history of sexual- ity into contact with the history of reading” (p. 12) has already proved generative for other scholars; and Susan S. Lanser’s The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565–1830, re- viewed at greater length in last year’s SEL roundup and offering the kind of authoritative overview that will make it indispensable reading for graduate courses. The promise of the e-book was that it would remarkably increase access at relatively little cost to individual readers, especially students with university affili- ations and research library access, but I am surely not alone in still finding a “real” book more convenient for academic reading. I won’t devote substantive critical attention to these individual volumes, but I should note that both the University of Delaware Press and Bucknell University Press continue to do a deep service to our field by publishing monographs and reissuing them in paperback wherever possible. More books in this category, most of them included in prior years’ roundups, include—to give the range—Melvyn New and Gerard Reedy, S. J.’s collection of essays Theology and Literature in the Age of Johnson: Resisting Secular- ism; the collection edited by Shaun Regan titled Reading 1759: Literary Culture in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain and France; Erin M. Goss’s Revealing Bodies: Anatomy, Allegory, and the Grounds of Knowledge in the Long Eighteenth Century; Frederick M. Keener’s Implication, Readers’ Resources, and Thomas Gray’s Pindaric Odes; Morgan Rooney’s The French Revolution Debate and the Brit- ish Novel, 1790–1814: The Struggle for History’s Authority; Brian McCrea’s Frances Burney and Narrative Prior to Ideology; and Alex Broadhead’s engaging The Language of Robert Burns: Style, Ideology, and Identity. I also received a copy of a volume originally published in hardcover in 2012 and issued in paperback in 2014, Norbert Schürer’s edition of Charlotte Lennox: Correspondence and Miscellaneous Documents. Finally, I was delighted to receive the paperback reissue of William McCarthy’s powerful and authorita- tive biography Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment. This book represents an incredible resource for anyone interested in Barbauld, whose work has become increasingly central, I think, to literary scholars with a wide range of interests. I did not receive or actively solicit journals in the field, so this roundup largely omits those. I regret that I didn’t have the where- Jenny Davidson 709 withal at the very least to single out a few especially distinctive articles, and I wonder whether there is either already a journal article roundup analogous to this one or whether something like that could be initiated, perhaps in a panel at ASECS rather than in the format of publication. I did make an exception for a pair of special issues that I will discuss in the paragraph immediately following this one. Three annuals reached my hands, two from AMS Press, the third the Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture volume that brings to the members of ASECS the best work pre- sented over the course of the previous year at the conferences of ASECS and its regional affiliates. I was not aware until I checked just now that SEEC is available digitally, through Project MUSE; in this day and age, I think it’s essential for dissemination and impact that journals should make articles accessible after this fashion. Religion in the Age of Enlightenment 5, edited by Brett C. McInelly and with Kathryn Duncan serving as book review editor, is held in my institution’s library but doesn’t seem to be available online; it contains a number of essays on topics that include French and German material as well as British, all loosely united under the rubric of the title. Of special interest to many will be the late Adrianne Wadewitz’s piece here, “Providential Em- piricism: Suffering and Shaping the Self in Eighteenth-Century British Children’s Literature,” which provides a nice overview of an important topic—the volume is dedicated to Wadewitz and to those who will miss her the most. The other annual is 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 22, edited by Kevin L. Cope with Scott Paul Gordon as book review editor. There is no space to enumerate all the contents, so I will simply note what a pleasure it was to read a piece that I heard presented, several years ago and at a much earlier stage of its development, by Michael Rotenberg-Schwartz at the Columbia Seminar in Eighteenth-Century European Culture: “Religious Exchanges: Solomon’s Temple, Holy Land Travel, and a Georgics of Sacred Space in Seventeenth– and Eighteenth-Century English Writing” provides a very rich overview of eighteenth-century travelers’ ac- counts of journeys to Palestine and the ways they are shaped by other literary precedents both sacred and secular, and the cita- tions provided in the footnotes should prove extremely useful to scholars working on related topics. It is surely not a coincidence that two major journals in our field both devoted special issues in 2015 to the question of perfor- mance (I am on the editorial board for both journals but was not involved with the production of either of these issues). Eighteenth- 710 Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century Century Studies 48, 4 (Summer 2015) opens with the introduc- tion, by Kathleen Wilson, of three “theses” on performance and history. Wilson proposes that “understanding performance as a politically charged social practice draws attention to what people actually did, rather than to what they just said they did,” thus correcting a tendency to overemphasize “discourse and cultural representation” at the expense of real lived history; that “the em- bodiment at the heart of performance … underlines how bodies, as history-bearing entities, can themselves disrupt or transform normative categories of ‘historical agency’ as well as racial, class, and national difference”; and that “performances of all kinds and at all social ranks reveal the existence of imaginaries that did not necessarily put the nation-state at their center, highlighting dimensions of desire, being, collectivity, and belonging that are frequently ignored” (pp. 376–7). Perhaps most praiseworthy is the issue’s sheer range of topics: it opens with William D. Fleming’s essay on performance and print in late eighteenth-century Japan and concludes with John Robbins on “balloonomania” and scien- tific performance in Elizabeth Inchbald’s The Mogul’s Tale (there is another nice article about ballooning and airships by Jessica Wichner in the Citizens of the World collection described above). This range comes, though, at some cost to coherence, and the issue is also bafflingly silent about editorial rationale—is Wilson the editor of this special issue? Were essays solicited or simply pulled from the regular submission pool? Why is there no overall description of the individual essays and the ways they fit together? Finally, though I know this is horribly petty (but then I have the soul of a copyeditor), Wilson’s bio at the foot of the journal’s very first page omits the name of her home institution, and within the text and footnotes of her introductory piece the last name of anthropologist Michael Taussig is misspelled in not one but two different ways (“Taussing,” p. 377, “Tausig,” p. 388n9). This is a trivial error to single out, but it erodes my confidence in the factual accuracy of articles and their citations when such obvious typographical errors catch my eye at the very front of the issue. Eighteenth-Century Fiction’s double issue 27, 3–4 (Spring– Summer 2015) conforms much more closely to what I think of as the Platonic ideal of the journal special issue. Edited by Daniel O’Quinn and Gillian Russell, it is titled “Georgian Theatre in an Information Age: Media, Performance, Sociability,” and it will represent an extraordinary resource for scholars and teachers for years to come. The vision the editors had for this volume comes through very strongly in their opening remarks—“Theatre is a Jenny Davidson 711 crucial medial hinge that provides a vantage point for considering a wide array of under-analyzed cultural and social phenomena” (p. 337)—and I don’t know that I’ve ever seen clearer evidence of the importance for all students of the eighteenth century, including those who are primarily interested in novels, to attend to theater history. O’Quinn and Russell note that the contributions are united in “recognition not only that theatre was a multi-layered performance event, occurring on stage and in the auditorium, but also that these performances were mediated throughout the print public sphere”: due to that imperative to consider the theater “in relation to other forms of cultural expression and contingent social and political stages,” they continue, the issue “includes essays by scholars who have not hitherto been identified as working within the field of theatre studies, and the collection engages with other forms of cultural production, such as the periodical and the novel” (p. 338). Which articles are singled out for attention will depend very much on personal taste, and I encourage readers to dip in deeply to all the work on offer, but my attention was especially caught by O’Quinn’s “Half-History, or The Function of Cato at the Present Time”; by Lisa Freeman’s essay on “The Siddonian Form” (which resonated powerfully with one of my favorite essays in the ECS issue, Heather McPherson’s “Tragic Pallor and Siddons”); and by Emily Hodgson Anderson’s essay on Tristram Shandy and Hamlet, which would make an excellent criticism reading assignment for an undergraduate history of the novel class. Most captivating of all—one of my other “must-read” picks out of this year’s large body of material—is Russell’s magical essay “Sarah Sophia Banks’s Private Theatricals: Ephemera, Sociability, and the Archiving of Fashionable Life.” It was revelatory to me and gave me the desire to plunge into an archive (a very pleasant albeit largely fantastical feeling to experience near the end of a demanding spring semester!). But this brief list really doesn’t do justice to the issue’s riches—what about Peter Otto on Horace Walpole, or Marcie Frank on Inchbald’s melodrama?—and the is- sue wraps up with an afterword by Joseph Roach, suitably so in the sense that his work has profoundly influenced almost all of this scholarship, with his generosity to younger scholars shining through on many of the issue’s pages. EDITIONS TEACHING AND SCHOLARLY I didn’t receive as many editions—scholarly or for use in the classroom—as I imagined I would, and I can’t say to what extent 712 Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century that has to do with fewer resources being available for such publications than in the past. In the introduction to Further Let- ters of David Hume, editor Felix Waldmann notes that the major twentieth-century editions of Hume’s letters, J. Y. T. Greig’s Let- ters of David Hume (1932) and Raymond Klibansky and Ernest Campbell Mossner’s New Letters of David Hume (1954), will ulti- mately be superseded by a edition of the complete Correspondence, commissioned in 1990 by Oxford University Press to be edited by David Raynor. This volume represents a supplement to Klibansky and Mossner’s volume and serves as “a provisional resource for scholars who are awaiting Dr. Raynor’s monumental Correspon- dence” (p. 1); it reproduces or abstracts seventy-three letters and manuscripts, many of them published here for the first time. Not the least interesting aspect of this volume is the light it casts on eighteenth-century letter-writing—we have letters in which Hume recommends the bearer to the recipient, thank-you letters for books sent or delivered, letters arranging or canceling meetings, letters enclosing other letters (“I shoud never have presum’d to write the enclos’d Letter to the Duke of Grafton, if I coud not, at the same time, have us’d the Freedom to send it open under Cover to your Lordship, who will either suppress it or send it, as you think proper” [p. 80]), and letters relating “to Hume’s abuse of the franking privilege afforded to members of parliament” (p. 5). This last point provides one of the most delightful moments in the volume: MP Andrew Stuart had sent Hume envelopes with a parliamentary frank addressed to Hume at “‘Edin.,’” envelopes Hume passed on to his correspondents, but the omission of the last bit of the place-name seems to have confused postal workers, and Hume writes Stuart as follows: I am afraid, that all my Correspondence with my Friends {has been} cut off, by my absurdly using your absurd Franks; where, for Saving a Syllable, the Direction is not intelligible in any place on this Side of Musselburgh: You, who have written Volumes, large enough to contain the whole Roman History, in order to prove a single Fact, which, Lord Mansfield says, you never did prove, how coud you be so sparing of a single Syllable, so essential to the Perspicuity of the Direction? I have sent you one of your Franks; and beg it of you to add these letters, b, u, r, g, h; or, if you still continue in the same frugal Humour, you may {, if you please,} retrench the last Letter, h, which is not so essential to render the Direction Intelligible. (p. 93) Jenny Davidson 713 Also notable is the text of the letter Hume wrote to Francesco Al- garotti in which he confesses his “Ignorance” of the amiable arts of music and painting (p. 52), and the appendices provide invalu- able up-to-date tabulations of the locations of various letters and manuscripts. The entire volume is a testament to Waldmann’s historical erudition and editorial labor. The Liberty Fund has produced an extremely handsome edi- tion of Edward Wortley Montagu’s Reflections on the Rise and Fall of the Ancient Republicks: Adapted to the Present State of Great Britain. The volume is edited by David Womersley, who adds a headnote to contextualize this publication within a new series, the Thomas Hollis Library. Hollis was an eighteenth-century English- man who distributed books that he believed would help promote the cause of liberty and who sent books very regularly to Harvard College, many of them printed and bound at his direction, in the years leading up to the Declaration of Independence. This series “makes freshly available a selection of titles that, because of their intellectual power, or the influence they exerted on the public life of their own time, or the distinctiveness of their approach to the topic of liberty, comprise the cream of the books distributed by Hollis” (p. vii). Womersley’s introduction provides valuable histori- cal context. His necessarily speculative discussion of “what at the level of practical politics … Hollis hope[d] to achieve by sending a copy of the Reflections to Harvard” (p. xxiv) is especially thought- provoking and illuminating, although Womersley’s admission “that Montagu’s political opinions amount to nothing more than a herd of the holiest cows of vulgar Whiggism” (pp. xxv–xxvi) and his candid classification of Montagu as “mediocre in terms both of the substance of his political and historical opinions and of the intellectual equipment he brought to bear upon those opinions” (p. xxvii) may not lead to marked growth in Montagu’s twenty- first-century readership. More likely to attract interest from literary and historical scholars, I think, are a pair of volumes from Liverpool Univer- sity Press that promise to make the work of Edward Rushton much more accessible. The Collected Writings of Edward Rushton (1756–1814), edited by Paul Baines, collects the poems and prose writings of the blind Liverpool sailor and bookseller, works which offer a valuable lens on the history of abolition and a number of other radical causes in the last years of the eighteenth century and the first years of the nineteenth. This is the first and only critical edition of Rushton’s poetry, and it should also make Rushton’s prose available to a wider audience. I don’t think I had 714 Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century ever seen the letter of remonstrance he wrote to Thomas Paine, circa 1800, urging that “The man who is truly a philanthropist, will ever be consistent; he cannot possess one class of feelings for white men, and another for negroes” (p. 192). Liverpool has also published what is surely the first full-length monograph devoted to Rushton’s career as a writer and activist. Franca Del- larosa’s Talking Revolution: Edward Rushton’s Rebellious Poetics, 1782–1814 is a first-rate critical biography, and taken together, these two volumes should enable Rushton’s work to join a large and sometimes quite riveting body of material at the intersection of working-class poetry and the literary history of abolitionism. With more potential than any of these, I think, to make its way onto an undergraduate syllabus is Vincent Carretta’s excel- lent new teaching edition, published by Broadview, of Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African. The introduction manages to cover all the essential topics with clarity and brevity, and the supplementary materials, as we have come to expect of the best of the Broadview editions, will add greatly to the volume’s ease of use for instructors—Carretta includes Sterne’s side of the correspondence with Sancho, for instance, as well as extracting almost fifty eighteenth-century references to Sancho and re- sponses to his published Letters. Also of interest to teachers will be Tiffany Potter’s edition of Eliza Haywood’s “The Masqueraders, or Fatal Curiosity” and “The Surprize, or Constancy Rewarded,” which includes a learned and thoughtful introduction (it struck me as an excellent example of the kind of scholarship that could well have been expanded to a full-length monograph but that is surely a much more useful contribution when it is juxtaposed to a newly edited primary text that can be added to a syllabus). The other teaching-related volume I saw was Jayne Lewis and Lisa Zunshine’s Approaches to Teaching the Works of John Dryden. It has been a topic of discussion, among scholars in our field in recent years, what place the literature of the Restoration holds in curricula and institutions, sandwiched as it is between a thriving early modern field and a smaller but still lively “long eighteenth century”; though an admirable group of activists were able to push back successfully against the MLA’s recent effort to eliminate the Restoration and early eighteenth-century literature division, there remains a curricular as well as an institutional squeeze that can make it difficult to find a place for a prolific writer such as Dryden. This is perhaps especially the case as “Augustan satire” becomes a less dominant teaching category and Swift and Pope are increasingly likely to be taught, say, in conjunction with Jenny Davidson 715 themes or topics like sex and sensibility in a survey that might go all the way through to the 1790s or beyond. In the undergradu- ate setting, I have only ever taught Marriage à-la-Mode (in an eighteenth-century drama survey) and “Absalom and Achitophel” (in a satire class), and I felt ashamed when I saw the imaginative ways in which the contributors to this volume have made Dryden’s work accessible in undergraduate classrooms. Will Pritchard’s essay “Teaching Marriage à-la-Mode in a Course on Restoration Comedy” and Daniel Gustafson and Elliott Visconsi’s “Teaching Dryden’s Heroic Plays” struck me as especially valuable, and I have promised myself that I will assign The Indian Emperor to my students at the first available opportunity. GHOST SCHOLARSHIP I had an increasingly strong sense, as I read these books and began to compose my account of the year’s work in the field, of the need for a category that might be called something like “ghost scholarship”: the invisible scholarship that could and in some sense should have been written and published if everyone who received a Ph.D. in eighteenth-century British literature in the last ten or fifteen years had been able to find a tenure-track job, or at least the kind of institutional home that makes it financially and logistically feasible to devote a good deal of energy to forms of research and publication that will rarely bring significant re- muneration. Without that kind of support, this sort of research is virtually impossible, and I suppose I feel some survivor’s guilt at being one of the lucky winners in a system that has so ruth- lessly excluded many scholars and teachers who would have been eminently suited to very similar sorts of career. I have found my- self preoccupied, over the last few years, with the idea—at once commonsensical and utopian—that the wealthier universities and colleges, if the will were there on the part of higher leadership, are in a position to convert immediately all adjunct teaching positions on the basis of a model where non-ladder-track instructors would universally be paid as a percentage of a full-time salary and load (that salary might differ dramatically based on the nature of the institution and the cost of living in the location associated with it—let’s say that at Columbia, in the humanities and humanistic social sciences, it might be $60,000/year with full benefits and a three-three load, which is less salary and more teaching than an incoming assistant professor would normally be assigned but not exponentially so, whereas that same three-three load at a small 716 Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century teaching institution in a less expensive part of the country might pay only two-thirds of that salary). With that condition in place, and with an effort to employ anyone who wanted it at a minimum of a 50% appointment, conditions would be significantly more hospitable to scholars coming out of Ph.D. programs than they are currently. The creation of more postdoctoral fellowships, teaching and otherwise, also seems to me an obvious and essential step to help our strongest graduate students stay in the game long enough to have a reasonable chance to secure a tenure-track job. Many of our best students already move sideways into high-school teaching, college administration, or technical writing, and I think that’s something to welcome. But it is hard for me to work out what I can do personally to help draw this “ghost scholarship” back into the real world of existence. NOTE Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal 1  in America (1964; rprt. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), p. 373. Jenny Davidson 717 BOOKS RECEIVED 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 22 (2015). Ed. Kevin L. Cope. New York: AMS Press, 2015. Pp. x + 374. $163.50. ISSN 1065-3112. Alber, Jan. Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama. Frontiers of Narrative. Series eds. Jesse E. Matz and David Herman. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. Pp. xiv + 316. $55.00. ISBN 978-0-8032-7868-4. Augustine, Matthew C., and Steven N. Zwicker, eds. Lord Rochester in the Restoration World. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015. Pp. x + 294. $99.00. ISBN 978-1-107-06439-3. Barnard, Teresa, ed. British Women and the Intellectual World in the Long Eighteenth Century. British Literature in Context in the Long Eighteenth Century. Series ed. Jack Lynch. Farnham UK and Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2015. Pp. xx + 196. $109.95. ISBN 978-1- 4724-3745-7. Berg, Temma, and Sonia Kane, eds. Women, Gender, and Print Cul- ture in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Essays in Memory of Betty Rizzo. Bethlehem PA: Lehigh Univ. Press; Lanham MD and Plymouth UK: Rowman and Littlefield, 2013. Pp. xxvi + 326. $90.00. ISBN 978-1- 61146-141-1. Blackwell, Mark, ed. The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England. Bucknell Stud- ies in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Gen. ed. Greg Clingham. 2007; rprt. Lewisburg PA: Bucknell Univ. Press; Lanham MD and Plymouth UK: Rowman and Littlefield; Cranbury NJ and London: Associated Univ. Presses, 2014. Pp. 366. $90.00. ISBN 978-1-61148-557-8. Broadhead, Alex. The Language of Robert Burns: Style, Ideology, and Identity. Lewisburg PA: Bucknell Univ. Press; Lanham MD and Plymouth UK: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015 (paper only). Pp. xiv + 238. $39.99 paper. ISBN 978-1-61148-704-6. Brooks, Helen E. M. Actresses, Gender, and the Eighteenth-Century Stage: Playing Women. Houndmills UK and New York: Palgrave Mac- millan, 2015. Pp. x + 206. $90.00. ISBN 978-0-230-29833-0. Butler, Marilyn. Mapping Mythologies: Countercurrents in Eighteenth- Century British Poetry and Cultural History. Cambridge and New 718 Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015. Pp. xxvi + 214. $39.99. ISBN 978-1-107-11638-2. Carretta, Vincent, ed. Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African. Peterborough ON: Broadview Press, 2015. Pp. 368. $18.95. ISBN 978-1-55481-196-0. Cook, Daniel, and Nicholas Seager, eds. The Afterlives of Eighteenth- Century Fiction. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015. Pp. x + 304. $99.00. ISBN 978-1-1070-5468-4. Cope, Kevin L., and Samara Anne Cahill, eds. Citizens of the World: Adapting in the Eighteenth Century. Transits: Literature, Thought, and Culture 1650–1850. Series eds. Greg Clingham and Kate Park- er. Lewisburg PA: Bucknell Univ. Press; Lanham MD and Plymouth UK: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015. Pp. xlviii + 176. $80.00. ISBN 978-1-61148-684-1. Cousins, A. D., and Geoffrey Payne, eds. Home and Nation in British Literature from the English to the French Revolutions. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015. Pp. xii + 290. $99.99. ISBN 978-1-107-06440-9. DeGabriele, Peter. Sovereign Power and the Enlightenment: Eigh- teenth-Century Literature and the Problem of the Political. Transits: Literature, Thought, and Culture 1650–1850. Series eds. Greg Clingham and Kate Parker. Lewisburg PA: Bucknell Univ. Press; Lanham MD and London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015. Pp. xxxiv + 184. $70.00. ISBN 978-1-61148-696-4. Dellarosa, Franca. Talking Revolution: Edward Rushton’s Rebel- lious Poetics, 1782–1814. Eighteenth Century Worlds. Series eds. Eve Rosenhaft and Mark Towsey. Liverpool: Liverpool Univ. Press (distributed by Oxford Univ. Press), 2014. Pp. xxviii + 238. $110.00. ISBN 978-1-78138-144-1. DeLucia, JoEllen. A Feminine Enlightenment: British Women Writ- ers and the Philosophy of Progress, 1759–1820. Edinburgh Criti- cal Studies in Romanticism. Series eds. Ian Duncan and Penny Fielding. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2015. Pp. viii + 208. $115.80. ISBN 978-0-7486-9594-2. ECCB The Eighteenth-Century Current Bibliography 36 for 2010. Gen. ed. Kevin L. Cope. New York: AMS Press, 2014. Pp. 680. $465.00. ISBN 978-0-404-62238-1. Jenny Davidson 719 Eighteenth-Century Fiction 27, 3–4 (Spring–Summer 2015). “Geor- gian Theatre in an Information Age: Media, Performance, Sociabil- ity.” Ed. Daniel O’Quinn and Gillian Russell. Toronto, Buffalo NY, and London: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2015. Pp. 764. $85.00. ISSN 0840-6286. Eighteenth-Century Studies 48, 4 (Summer 2015). “Special Issue: Performance.” Ed. Steve Pincus. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2015. Pp. 571. $42.50. ISSN 0013-2586. Erwin, Timothy. Textual Vision: Augustan Design and the Invention of Eighteenth-Century British Culture. Transits: Literature, Thought, and Culture 1650–1850. Series eds. Greg Clingham and Kate Park- er. Lewisburg PA: Bucknell Univ. Press; Lanham MD and Plymouth UK: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015. Pp. xviii + 284. $95.00. ISBN 978-1-61148-569-1. Esterhammer, Angela, Diane Piccitto, and Patrick Vincent, eds. Romanticism, Rousseau, Switzerland: New Prospects. Palgrave Stud- ies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Cultures of Print. Gen. eds. Anne K. Mellor and Clifford Siskin. Houndmills UK and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Pp. xii + 232. $90.00. ISBN 978-1- 137-47585-5. Fermanis, Porscha, and John Regan, eds. Rethinking British Roman- tic History, 1770–1845. Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2014. Pp. xiv + 338. $99.00. ISBN 978-0-19-968708-4. Frohock, Richard. Buccaneers and Privateers: The Story of the Eng- lish Sea Rover, 1675–1725. Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press; Lan- ham MD and Plymouth UK: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014 (paper only). Pp. xii + 190. $34.99 paper. ISBN 978-1-61149-521-8. Garside, Peter, and Karen O’Brien, eds. The Oxford History of the Novel in English Vol. 2: English and British Fiction, 1750–1820. Oxford History of the Novel in English. Gen. ed. Patrick Parrinder. Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2015. Pp. xxxii + 672. $160.00. ISBN 978-0-19-957480-3. Gavin, Michael. The Invention of English Criticism, 1650–1760. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015. Pp. 227. $99.99. ISBN 978-1-1071-0120-3. Goss, Erin M. Revealing Bodies: Anatomy, Allegory, and the Grounds of Knowledge in the Long Eighteenth Century. Transits: Literature, Thought, and Culture 1650–1850. Series eds. Greg Clingham and Kate Parker. Lewisburg PA: Bucknell Univ. Press; Lanham MD and 720 Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century Plymouth UK: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014 (paper only). Pp. xiv + 224. $39.99 paper. ISBN 978-1-61148-592-9. Haywood, Eliza. “The Masqueraders, or Fatal Curiosity” and “The Surprize, or Constancy Rewarded.” Ed. Tiffany Potter. Toronto, Buf- falo NY, and London: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2015. Pp. xviii + 190. $60.00 cloth. ISBN 978-1-4426-4779-4. $24.95 paper. ISBN 978-1- 4426-1587-8. Hume, David. Further Letters of David Hume. Ed. Felix Waldmann. Occasional Publications. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Bibliographical Society, 2014. Pp. x + 316. £25.00. ISBN 978-0-9573359-1-2. Ingrassia, Catherine. The Cambridge Companion to Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–1789. Cambridge Companion to Topics. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015. Pp. xx + 268. $29.99 paper. ISBN 978-1-107-60098-0. Johnson, Nancy E., ed. Impassioned Jurisprudence: Law, Literature, and Emotion, 1760–1848. Aperçus: Histories Texts Cultures. Series ed. Greg Clingham. Lewisburg PA: Bucknell Univ. Press; Lanham MD and Plymouth UK: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015. Pp. xxvi + 172. $70.00 cloth. ISBN 978-1-61148-675-9. $39.99 paper. ISBN 978-1-61148-677-3. Jost, Jacob Sider. Prose Immortality, 1711–1819. Charlottesville and London: Univ. of Virginia Press, 2015. Pp. x + 246. $45.00. ISBN 978-0-8139-3680-2. Keener, Frederick M. Implication, Readers’ Resources, and Thomas Gray’s Pindaric Odes. Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press; Lanham MD and Plymouth UK: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014 (paper only). Pp. viii + 244. $39.99 paper. ISBN 978-1-61149-524-9. Kelleher, Paul. Making Love: Sentiment and Sexuality in Eighteenth- Century British Literature. Transits: Literature, Thought, and Culture 1650–1850. Series eds. Greg Clingham and Kate Parker. Lewisburg PA: Bucknell Univ. Press; Lanham MD and London: Row- man and Littlefield, 2015. Pp. xii + 260. $90.00. ISBN 978-1-61148- 693-3. Lanser, Susan S. The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sap- phic, 1565–1830. Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2014. Pp. x + 350. $32.30 paper. ISBN 978-0-226-18773-0. Lavery, Hannah. The Impotency Poem from Ancient Latin to Restora- tion English Literature. Farnham UK and Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2014. Pp. viii + 200. $109.95. ISBN 978-1-4724-2202-6. Jenny Davidson 721 Lehleiter, Christine. Romanticism, Origins, and the History of Hered- ity. New Studies in the Age of Goethe. Lewisburg PA: Bucknell Univ. Press; Lanham MD and Plymouth UK: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014. Pp. xvi + 328. $100.00. ISBN 978-1-61148-565-3. Leigh, John. Touché: The Duel in Literature. Cambridge MA and London: Harvard Univ. Press, 2015. Pp. x + 340. $35.00. ISBN 978- 0-674-50438-7. Lennox, Charlotte. Charlotte Lennox: Correspondence and Miscella- neous Documents. Ed. and introduction by Norbert Schürer. Lew- isburg PA: Bucknell Univ. Press; Lanham MD and Plymouth UK: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014 (paper only). Pp. lvi + 424. $32.99 paper. ISBN 978-1-61148-567-7. Lewis, Jayne, and Lisa Zunshine, eds. Approaches to Teaching the Works of John Dryden. Approaches to Teaching World Literature 126. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2013. Pp. x + 206. $37.50 cloth. ISBN 978-1-60329-125-5. $19.75 paper. ISBN 978-1-60329-126-2. Looser, Devoney, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Women’s Writing in the Romantic Period. Cambridge Companions to Topics. Cam- bridge and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015. Pp. xxx + 248. $29.99 paper. ISBN 978-1-107-60255-7. Lubey, Kathleen. Excitable Imaginations: Eroticism and Reading in Britain, 1660–1760. Transits: Literature, Thought, and Culture 1650–1850. Series eds. Greg Clingham and Kate Parker. Lewisburg PA: Bucknell Univ. Press; Lanham MD and Plymouth UK: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014 (paper only). Pp. xii + 274. $39.99 paper. ISBN 978-1-61148-586-8. McCarthy, William. Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlighten- ment. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2015 (paper only). Pp. xxvi + 726. $39.95 paper. ISBN 978-1-4214-1823-0. McCrea, Brian. Frances Burney and Narrative Prior to Ideology. Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press; Lanham MD and Plymouth UK: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015 (paper only). Pp. xiv + 194. $39.99 paper. ISBN 978-1-61149-574-4. Menely, Tobias. The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice. Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2015. Pp. viii + 272. $30.00 paper. ISBN 978-0-226-23925-5. 722 Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century Mentz, Steve. Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization, 1550– 1719. Minneapolis and London: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2015. Pp. xxxiv + 230. $105.00 cloth. ISBN 978-0-8166-9103-6. $30.00 paper. ISBN 978-0-8166-9106-7. Meranze, Michael, and Saree Makdisi, eds. Imagining the British Atlantic after the American Revolution. UCLA Clark Memorial Library Series. Gen. ed. Barbara Fuchs. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press (in association with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth– and Eighteenth- Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library), 2015. Pp. xii + 284. $65.00. ISBN 978-1-4426-5069-5. Michals, Teresa. Books for Children, Books for Adults: Age and the Novel from Defoe to James. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2014. Pp. x + 278. $95.00. ISBN 978-1-107-04854-6. Miller, Christopher R. Surprise: The Poetics of the Unexpected from Milton to Austen. Ithaca and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 2015. Pp. x + 270. $49.95. ISBN 978-0-8014-5369-4. Montagu, Edward Wortley. Reflections on the Rise and Fall of the An- cient Republicks: Adapted to the Present State of Great Britain. Ed. David Womersley. Thomas Hollis Library. Gen. ed. David Womers- ley. Indianapolis IN: Liberty Fund, 2015. Pp. xl + 312. $24.00. ISBN 978-0-86597-871-3. Mounsey, Chris, ed. Developments in the Histories of Sexualities: In Search of the Normal, 1600–1800. Transits: Literature, Thought, and Culture 1650–1850. Series eds. Greg Clingham and Kate Park- er. Lewisburg PA: Bucknell Univ. Press; Lanham MD and Plymouth UK: Rowman and Littlefield, 2013. Pp. xxvi + 304. $95.00. ISBN 978-1-61148-500-4. Müller, Lothar. White Magic: The Age of Paper. Trans. Jessica Spen- gler. Cambridge and Malden MA: Polity (distributed by Wiley), 2014. Pp. xiv + 322. $25.00. ISBN 978-0-745-67253-3. Napier, Elizabeth R. Defoe’s Major Fiction: Accounting for the Self. Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press; Lanham MD and Plymouth UK: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016. Pp. xxxii + 160. $70.00. ISBN 978-1- 61149-613-0. New, Melvyn, and Gerard Reedy, S.J., eds. Theology and Literature in the Age of Johnson: Resisting Secularism. Newark: Univ. of Dela- ware Press; Lanham MD and Plymouth UK: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014 (paper only). Pp. xxii + 350. $32.99 paper. ISBN 978-1-61147- 697-2. Jenny Davidson 723 New, Melvyn, Peter de Voogd, and Judith Hawley, eds. Sterne, Tristram, Yorick: Tercentenary Essays on Laurence Sterne. Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press; Lanham MD and Plymouth UK: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016. Pp. xviii + 268. $85.00. ISBN 978-1-61149- 570-6. Nichol, Donald W., ed. Anniversary Essays on Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock.” Toronto, Buffalo NY, and London: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2016. Pp. xl + 272. $65.00. ISBN 978-1-4426-4796- 1. Norbrook, David, Stephen Harrison, and Philip Hardie, eds. Lucre- tius and the Early Modern. Classical Presences. Gen. eds. Lorna Hardwick and James I. Porter. Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2016. Pp. xi + 320. $100.00. ISBN 978-0-19-871384-5. O’Brien, John. Literature Incorporated: The Cultural Unconscious of the Business Corporation, 1650–1850. Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2016. Pp. vi + 274. $45.00. ISBN 978-0-226-29112- 3. Pasanek, Brad. Metaphors of Mind: An Eighteenth-Century Diction- ary. Baltimore: John Hopkins Univ. Press, 2015. Pp. xviii + 374. $49.95. ISBN 978-1-4214-1688-5. Philp, Mark. Reforming Ideas in Britain: Politics and Language in the Shadow of the French Revolution, 1789–1815. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2014. Pp. xii + 324. $99.00. ISBN 978-1-107-02728-2. Porter, Anna Maria. Walsh Colville: Or, A Young Man’s First Entrance Into Life. A Critical and Annotated Edition. Ed. David Owen. Lew- iston NY, Queenston ON, and Lampeter UK: Edwin Mellen Press, 2015. Pp. lvi + 160. $159.95. ISBN 978-1-4955-0382-5. Power, Henry. Epic into Novel: Henry Fielding, Scriblerian Satire, and the Consumption of Classical Literature. Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2015. Pp. xiv + 242. $95.00. ISBN 978-0-19- 872387-5. Prendergast, Thomas A. Poetical Dust: Poets’ Corner and the Making of Britain. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Pp. ix + 242. $59.95. ISBN 978-0-8122-4750-3. Regan, Shaun, ed. Reading 1759: Literary Culture in Mid-Eighteenth- Century Britain and France. Transits: Literature, Thought, and Culture 1650–1850. Series eds. Greg Clingham and Kate Parker. 724 Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century Lewisburg PA: Bucknell Univ. Press; Lanham MD and London: Row- man and Littlefield, 2014 (paper only). Pp. viii + 256. $39.99 paper. ISBN 978-1-61148-593-6. Reilly, Patrick. Bills of Mortality: Disease and Destiny in Plague Literature from Early Modern to Postmodern Times. Currents in Comparative Romance Languages and Literatures 223. Gen. eds. Tamara Alvarez-Detrell and Michael G. Paulson. New York and Frankfurt am Maim: Peter Lang, 2015. Pp. 202. $83.95. ISBN 978- 1-4331-2422-8. Religion in the Age of Enlightenment. 5 (2015). Ed. Brett C. McInelly and Kathryn Duncan. New York: AMS Press, 2015. Pp. viii + 340. $125.00. ISBN 978-0-404-63315-8. Richetti, John. The Life of Daniel Defoe: A Critical Biography. Malden MA, Oxford, and Chichester UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2015. Pp. xii + 412. $39.95 paper. ISBN 978-1-119-04530-4. Rooney, Morgan. The French Revolution Debate and the British Novel, 1790–1814: The Struggle for History’s Authority. Transits: Lit- erature, Thought, and Culture 1650–1850. Series eds. Greg Cling- ham and Kate Parker. Lewisburg PA: Bucknell Univ. Press; Lanham MD and London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014 (paper only). Pp. viii + 224. $39.99 paper. ISBN 978-1-61148-596-7. Rushton, Edward. The Collected Writings of Edward Rushton (1756–1814). Ed. Paul Baines. Liverpool English Texts and Studies 65. Liverpool: Liverpool Univ. Press, 2014. Pp. xii + 348. $110.00. ISBN 978-1-78138-136-6. Shields, Juliet. Nation and Migration: The Making of British Atlantic Literature, 1765–1835. Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2016. Pp. xii + 196. $74.00. ISBN 978-0-19-027255-5. Silver, Sean. The Mind Is a Collection: Case Studies in Eighteenth- Century Thought. Material Texts. Series eds. Roger Chartier, Joseph Farrell, Anthony Grafton, Leah Price, Peter Stallybrass, and Michael F. Suarez. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Pp. xii + 372. $65.00. ISBN 978-0-8122-4726-8. Solomon, Diana. Prologues and Epilogues of Restoration Theater: Gender and Comedy, Performance and Print. Newark: Univ. of Dela- ware Press; Lanham MD and Plymouth UK: Rowman and Little- field, 2013. Pp. viii + 264. $75.00 cloth. ISBN 978-1-61149-422-8. $39.99 paper (2015). ISBN 978-1-61149-576-8. Jenny Davidson 725 Starr, G. Gabrielle. Lyric Generations: Poetry and the Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2015 (paper only). Pp. xii + 300. $29.95 paper. ISBN 978-1-4214-1822-3. Stephanson, Raymond, and Darren N. Wagner, eds. The Secrets of Generation: Reproduction in the Long Eighteenth Century. Toronto, Buffalo NY, and London: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2015. Pp. xviii + 566. $90.00. ISBN 978-1-4426-4696-4. Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 44 (2015). Ed. Michelle Burn- ham and Eve Tavor Bannet. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2015. Pp. xiv + 270. $45.00. ISBN 978-1-4214-1862-9. Swan, Jesse G., ed. Editing Lives: Essays in Contemporary Textual and Biographical Studies in Honor of O M Brack Jr. Lewisburg PA: Bucknell Univ. Press; Lanham MD and London: Rowman and Little- field, 2014. Pp. xxx + 262. $85.00. ISBN 978-1-61148-540-0. Swenson, Rivka. Essential Scots and the Idea of Unionism in Anglo- Scottish Literature, 1603–1832. Transits: Literature, Thought, and Culture 1650–1850. Series eds. Greg Clingham and Kate Parker. Lewisburg PA: Bucknell Univ. Press; Lanham MD and London: Row- man and Littlefield, 2016. Pp. xviii + 332. $100.00. ISBN 978-1- 61148-678-0. Thomason, Laura E. The Matrimonial Trap: Eighteenth-Century Women Writers Redefine Marriage. Transits: Literature, Thought, and Culture 1650–1850. Series eds. Greg Clingham and Kate Parker. Lewisburg PA: Bucknell Univ. Press; Lanham MD and Lon- don: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015 (paper only). Pp. x + 206. $39.99 paper. ISBN 978-1-61148-705-3. Townshend, Dale, ed. Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination. London: British Library (distributed by Univ. of Chicago Press), 2014. Pp. 224. $40.00 paper. ISBN 978-0-7123-5791-3. Walters, Lisa. Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Science, and Politics. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2014. Pp. vi + 266. $95.00. ISBN 978-1-107-06643-4.