Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century: Accounting for Defoe (review)

REVIEWS 119 overtones of the central story, as hero and heroine, in their efforts to be worthy of each other, pile obstacles in the way of their happiness with a tenacity worthy of Rodrigue and Chimène. Above all, feminist readings run the risk of diluting the novel's historical dimension. Thirty years before Balzac, Staël understood what was not yet clear to her protagonists: that in the modern world, whether in 1792 or 1802 or any period of political upheaval thereafter, survival depends not on looking to the past (Léonce's preference) or to the future (Delphine's), but rather on coping with and accommodating oneself to a rapidly evolving present. Of the translation itself, no praise can be too high. Only once—in nearly five hundred pages!—did my ear detect a slight anachronism. Writing to her sister-inlaw , Delphine says: "Madame du Marset was in a corner of the room. Have I told you that she cannot stand me although I have never behaved badly toward her?" "Stand" in this sense has a distinctly twentieth-century sound to it, although the OED lists the usage as early as 1879. It is the mark of a great translation that it reads as well, or better, than the original. Avriel Goldberger's belongs in that select company. If there are prizes for such things, her publishers should make sure that she gets one. Graham Falconer University of Toronto Sandra Sherman. Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century : Accounting for Defoe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. xii+ 222pp. $54.95. ISBN 0-52148154-6. Developing a reading strategy out of a theory differently elaborated by Lucien Goldman in the 1960s, Sandra Sherman grounds her methodology in a basic homology between financial systems of credit inaugurated in the early years of the eighteenth century and the contemporary production of fictions by a single author . Always stimulating and often ingenious, Finance and Fictionality accounts for Defoe's writing in ways that future readers will in turn have to take into account . Sherman's argument brings together economic and fictional discourses to rewrite conventional, genre-based constructions of Defoe as early figure in the "rise of the novel"; constructions that were jeopardized by an anachronistic imposition of formalist requirements onto a form not then understood or even perceived as such by fiction-makers. Similarly, treatments of Defoe as a writer struggling with elements of his own, and his audience's, residual Puritan derivations and assumptions are shown to be deficient: Defoe was negotiating secular, market-based phenomena to a far greater degree than was hitherto apparent. Defoe's treatment of Lady Credit is refreshingly examined—disclosing an author unable to contain this "Coy Mistress" within norms of narrative practice: 120 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 10:1 "[Defoe] becomes a subject of the text as he produces Lady Credit; in control but not; a phenomenon of the market, like Lady Credit, in the uncertainty of his deportment" (p. 44). Both the "Lady" and the narrative that presents her, together with the author, represent marketplace credit because they each of them defy rational construction and resist narrative closure. Like the Lady, Defoe is volatile, a narrator on whom it is difficult to place any value and one whose discourse inscribes market shiftiness. "In the area of politics especially , the credit-based market provides a paradigm for Lady Credit, who as text provides a paradigm for Defoe, who writes Lady Credit as ur-text for political/textual strategy" (p. 47). This is genuinely illuminating work, but it should be said that politics is an area where Sherman's book is relatively insecure . Her discussion of Lady Credit arises significantly from Defoe's Review, and while she acknowledges that Defoe's political allegiances changed during its publishing lifetime, Sherman does not pursue the necessary impact this had on the structure and direction of his argument and figuration. She makes little of Defoe's bankruptcy, which must have been experientially instructive in a number of ways, and although it may seem niggardly in the face of extensive economic writings here cited—citations that emphasize a requirement for literary research to integrate socio-economic environments into its...