Utopian Imagination and Eighteenth-Century Fiction (review)

REVIEWS 367 Considerable space is given by Minerva to the Napoleonic myth, surprisingly included in a book of this nature. It could be argued, as the author does, that some French historians, seduced by Bonapartism, defended Napoleon, not only as a military genius, but as a scientist and statesman who would have unified the world. Some of these historians, such as Pierre-Ignace Jaunez-Sponville in his Philosophie du Ruvarebohni and Louis Geoffroy in his Napoléon et la conquête du monde (1836), even defended Napoleon's genetic program of unifying all races within seven generations. This project, the basic assumption of which was that there would be a French state that would guide the world, does not seem to suggest to Minerva a curious anticipation of Hitler's pan-Germanism. Her only reason for the inclusion of these texts seems to be her impression that they are not well known to the scholars of Utopia and that the specialists of the Napoleonic myth are not always aware of their existence (p. 211). Utopia e.. Amici e nemici del genere utopico nella letteraturefrancesa has moments of brilliant discussion alternating with sections which give the impression that they do not belong in a book of this nature. Nevertheless, on the whole, this study merits our attention. Stelio Cro McMaster University Christine Rees. Utopian Imagination and Eighteenth-Century Fiction. London and New York: Longman, 1996. vi + 296pp. ISBN 0-582214130 . After accurately remarking important attributes of classical, Renaissance, and seventeenth-century Utopias by way of background, Christine Rees divides her topic into chapters on overseas Utopias {Robinson Crusoe, A General History of the Pyrates, Gaudentio di Lucca, Peter Wilkins); satire and Utopia {Gulliver's Travels); domestic Utopias {Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, Clarissa, Sir Charles Grandison); women's Utopias {New Atalantis, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies and Reflections upon Marriage, Millenium Hall, Munster Village); and Utopia and the philosophical tale {Rasselas). Because her focus is thus primarily upon works in English, a more precise title for her book would have been Utopian imagination and Eighteenth-Century English Fiction. Occasional allusions to Montaigne's essays, Cyrano de Bergerac's L'autre monde, Montesquieu's Lettres persanes, Voltaire's Candide, and other relevant French writing, however, effectively widen the horizons of this study in ways that make me wish Rees had shared more of her own intelligent ventures across the Channel. Extended comparisons with Candide would have complemented her excellent discussion of Rasselas as "a gold standard for eighteenth-century Utopian writing" (p. 246). Her shrewd analysis of Lovelace as libertine Utopian fantast could have been even more effectively framed by comparison with Rétif de la Bretonne's no 368 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 9:3 less bizarre but usually less destructive ruminations and, of course, by comparison with the peverse Utopias of that really kindred spirit, the Marquis de Sade. Apt glances at Aldous Huxley and George Orwell might have been appropriately augmented by attention to their origins in the eighteenth century's most innovative and influential Utopia, Louis-Sébastien Mercier's L'An 2440, which first demonstrated the rich Utopian possibilities of futuristic fiction. What Rees does, however, she does well, because, without losing sight of boundaries, she applies a latitudinarian view of genre that is helpful to her project of delineating characteristics shared by Utopias proper and other modes. She is concerned less with formal features of the Utopian genre crystallized by Sir Thomas More than with the imaginative impulses underlying all works that in some way point towards the world as it might be and thereby invite attention to (usually distressing) features of the world as it is. Accordingly, for Rees, Gulliver's Travels is the eighteenth century's prime example at once of satire resorting to Utopian modes and satire ofUtopian modes. She is a reliable guide through the labyrinth of Swift's variations on the landscapes of noplace. Although for his territory there is no lack of Baedekers, Swift could hardly have been scanted without obscuring crucial links between fantasy, Utopia, and novels more apparently centred on the real world inhabited by their readers. Rees's account of Utopian affinities in The Life and Adventures ofPeter...