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REVIEWS 303 emphasizes their seemingly unmotivated status, their lack of causality. On the opening page of Zadig, Kavanagh reads the alternation between the imperfect verb tense and the passé simple as the sudden intrusion of chance into the realm of stability and rationality. After discussing Point de lendemain and several of Crébillon's novels, Kavanagh ends with the narrative that most successfully stages the debate between freedom and fatalism , absolute chance and rigid predictability, Diderot's Jacques le fataliste. Kavanagh illuminates Jacques by referring to the prospectus for the Encyclopédie, where Diderot distinguishes between what is known and what is left to know. What still (always?) remains missing is crucial to this novel, described as "an unintegrated multiplicity of elements whose value lies outside any overarching system imposed on its parts" (p. 246). Hard and fast conclusions do not flow easily from à study like this one. Rather Kavanagh leaves us with a series of specific, provocative insights into several novels and a solid basis for a cultural history of gambling under the ancien régime. Peter V. Conroy, Jr University of Illinois, Chicago Rosemary Lloyd. The Land ofLost Content: Children and Childhood in Nineteenth -Century French Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. xiv + 271pp. $94.50. ISBN 0-19-81517-X. Samuel F. Pickering, Jr. Moral Instruction and Fictionfor Children 1749-1820. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993. ? + 214pp. US$35.00. ISBN 0-82031463 -3. Rosemary Lloyd's The Land of Lost Content begins with a quotation from Colette: "Where are the children?" The epigraph is as resonant for the student of eighteenthcentury fiction as it is relevant to Lloyd's exploration of the ways in which nineteenthcentury French writers represent childhood and children. There is, for example, no entry for "children" in Michael McKeon's massive study of the English novel's origins, although the young are of course there in the guise of apprentices, orphans, foundlings, nubile heroines, and lusty youths on the make. Indeed, Marthe Roberts suggests that abandoned children—the bastard and the foundling—model the novel's foundational plots (as in Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe). Although J. Paul Hunter and other students of eighteenth-century fiction have noted the interplay between young readers and the emergent novel, it is still fair to say that the representation of eighteenth-century childhood remains an orphan—the bastard child on the doorstep that literature, art, history, sociology , and critical theory have not yet welcomed into the family. Because it solicits transdisciplinary approaches, childhood is everywhere and nowhere, a good chapter in art history here, an interesting essay on education there. "Children's literature" itself is, moreover, an ambiguous term, a polymorphous possessive which may signal "of," "by," "for," or "about," and which always implies a symbiosis of child and adult: it is adults who write and buy the books and often read them to children. Meanwhile, our cultural narratives of the child get trickier all the time. What used to be called the "invention of childhood" has elicited much inquiry into the eighteenth-century youngster's family life, but archivists now contest the influential formulations of Philippe Aries and Lawrence Stone (was there any such "invention" at all?), 304 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 6:3 and postmodern theorists deconstruct the developmental notions that shape the stories of childhood we thought we knew (is development not itself an invention, just another fictional plot?). Even slipperier than historical childhood is early children's literature, the most neglected area in an already marginal specialty. Labelled as imaginatively retarded , children's literature is the only eighteenth-century genre still dismissed as merely didactic. The two books under review are therefore especially noteworthy: how do they negotiate a seemingly fallow pastoral common that is also a potential critical minefield? Rosemary Lloyd's Land ofLost Content is as interesting for the questions it raises and the themes it suggests as for the light it throws on the "long" eighteenth century. She begins by wondering why nineteenth-century French literature is reputed childless when its English counterpart is so literarily fecund, and she makes us wonder in turn about the occluded Enlightenment origins for the Victorian "Golden Age" ofjuvenile portrayals. She conjoins representations...

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