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128 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 11:1 crowd). An illusion of romantic possibility between the two is accomplished through a series of displacements and transfers through a series of proxies, whose function is to bring to an incipient relationship hopes of consummation that will never be fulfilled. "Égarements," the third and last section, deals with conditions of extreme disarray (as found, for instance, in Phèdre's confession or in the surprises of love in a Marivaux text). Neither will, nor passion, nor reason can bring deliverance to those who have succumbed to the ruses of Eros. In "L'Apprentissage de Meilcour," Pierre Hartman convincingly suggests that Meilcour's successful apprenticeship in corrupt high society had driven him to a moral point of no return, and asks whether this is the reason why Crébillon did not conclude the novel and provide his readers with the happy ending promised in his foreword. In "Les Egarements du cœur et de l'esprit, roman inachevé," Henri Coulet remarks that in a society that thrives on dissimulation it is impossible to guess how Crébillon might have concluded the novel, despite his promise of a happy ending. He suggests, as Hartman does, that Meilcour's initiation into the hollow-hearted ways of the aristocratic world had trained him too well in libertine ways to permit him to reclaim his unspoiled former self. Offering an alternative explanation for the unfinished state of the book, Coulet notes that in 1738 Chancellor Daguessau decreed a ban on novels that forced authors to interrupt work and to change plans. Is this why Crébillon did not conclude what many consider to be his finest work? Songe, illusion, égarement dans les romans de Crébillon charts out new directions and delves into barely explored areas of Crébillon's work, such as the anti-Proustian treatment of memory and forgetfulness in Les Egarements (JeanFran çois Perrin) or the conjectural role filled by the reserved Hortense in the novel (Jean Sgard). The book contains many first-rate articles and confirms the modernity of an author whose capacity to excite the interpretive spirit remains very much alive. Ernest Sturm University of California, Santa Barbara Ronald Paulson. Don Quixote in England: The Aesthetics of Laughter. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. xx+242pp. US$35.00. ISBN 0-8018-5695-7. Ian Watt's dismissive treatment of Fielding's Preface to Joseph Andrews in The Rise ofthe Novel—"Joseph Andrews was a hurriedly composed work of somewhat mixed intentions, begun as a parody of Pamela and continued in the spirit of Cervantes; and this perhaps suggests that not too much importance should be attached to his Preface" (1974 reprint, p. 285)—was by implication a dismissal also of Cervantes, who rates only a very few brief mentions in Watt's story. The REVIEWS 129 success ofWatt's endeavour to plant a flag in the novel and claim it for England has resulted in a general neglect of Cervantes (Michael McKeon, as one so often says, an honourable exception) that is only recently beginning to be redressed. Ronald Paulson's book is a distinguished and fascinating contribution to this rehabilitation process. Paulson's argument is a very broad one. Cervantes' "blame-by-praise irony," his unique representation of both high and low burlesque in one single structure of experience, enables not merely the development of a particular genre (the novel) but rather an entirely new aesthetics of the comic that informs all genres of imaginative writing as well as the work of the key visual artist of the era, William Hogarth. There were party political appropriations of the Quixotic—by Swift, for example, for whom it was "a Tory-Ancient satire on reading the wrong books" (p. 29), and by Shaftesbury who develops from it an "old Whig" account of the beautiful as classical perfection, elaborated in response to the priest-ridden enthusiasm of an earlier era. Paulson refers Shaftesbury's aesthetics to Cervantes in the (rather loose) sense that the former could be said to take Don Quixote's view of aesthetic value—that it resides in the ideal Dulcinea, the perfect object. But Paulson considers that eighteenth-century writers and...

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