Eighteenth-Century Genre and Culture: Serious Reflections on Occasional Forms. Essays in Honor of J. Paul Hunter (review)

REVIEWS163 Dennis Todd and Cynthia Wall, eds. Eighteenth-Century Genre and Culture : Serious Reflections on Occasional Forms. Essays in Honor ofJ. Paul Hunter. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2001. 316pp. US$47.50. ISBN 0-87413-759-4. "Serious Reflections," indeed. There are attempts at levity in Claude Rawson 's deft survey of male "adventurers," acting and acted upon, Michael McKeon's risk-taking and extremely wide-ranging discussion of "political poetry" (with examples from Yeats, Brecht, Rukeyser, Baraka, Clifton, Rich, Olds, and even Milton, among others), Martin Battestin's amusing and informative return to DrJohnson and "the case of Harry Fielding" (Fielding, as one might suspect, gets a lot of attention in this volume), and Cynthia Wall's romp through the "spaces of things" in Bunyan and Leapor; nonetheless , this is an unusually sober—and strong—compilation of essays. It owes its strength largely, I would guess, to the eminence and range of the honorée, and the care and dedication of the two editors. This Festschrift will come to be known, with affection and respect, as the "Hunter collection ," and it will make its presence felt for some time to come. The editors, in their concise (if perhaps a bit too compressed) introduction, pay tribute to Paul Hunter's influence on the directions of eighteenth-century studies in the past forty years, and his strengthening of that scholarly community through his originality, rigour, energy, generosity,judgment, and tact. In addition , I would single out his important recent studies of the heroic couplet, the novel, and print culture. Unlike some other Titans of industry in our profession, Hunter is also known for his genuine personal kindliness, good sense, relaxed pace, and quiet humour. One is tempted to approach these fourteen essays in terms of an "Ancients and Moderns" paradigm, though not in the obvious sense ofcontestation the term implies, with seven senior, well-established scholars, most with endowed chairs and the sonorous tides that go with them, and five younger assistant and associate professors staking out or improving their claims on the eighteenth-century professional map, with two sort of in between, though one of these, McKeon, quotes from a book he wrote twenty-five years ago (p. 294). Older, but not yet Ancient. The sides would have been closer to even with a contribution from coeditor Dennis Todd. On balance, I would have to say that the seven or eight essays here I have learned most from, and found most stimulating, come in greater number (though outnumbered ) from the camp of the Moderns than from the camp of the Ancients. I shall concentrate my remarks primarily on those essays, beginning with Janine Barchas's instructive demonstration that the so-called "print revolution" hailed byJohn Brewer and others (like so many academically defined—or invented—"revolutions") may be a misnomer. In addition to the small number of printing presses at the start of the century, and 164EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION15:1 their slow cumulative annual rate ofgrowth, a survey of the incremental increase of the number of individual book titles suggests "an almost glacial expansion of print over the first half of the century ... the growth of print culture—along with that of the print industry—might prove evolutionary rather than revolutionary" (pp. 17-18). Barchas further illuminates early print culture by examining the writings of Mary, Lady Chudleigh (16561710 ), who "wrote on the cusp between manuscript and print. ... Like many of her late-Restoration contemporaries—both male and female— Chudleigh's literary reputation was shaped first and foremost by her circulated manuscripts. Chudleigh was in her mid-forties when, with the 1701 publication of the The Ladies Defence, she stepped into the spotlight of the literary marketplace and became, as Margaret Ezell terms it, 'a poet whom strangers read'" (p. 18). One of the main virtues of this collection is its multiple focus on less well known but significant works (such as Fielding's Amelia) and writers, mostly novelists, such as Mary Hearne in Kathryn King's discussion of "The Novel before Novels." After fearless opening salvoes against three other Titans, John Bender, John Richetti, and Margaret Anne Doody, King argues that early self-styled...