Modern Essays on Eighteenth-Century Literature (review)

Reviews Leopold Damrosch, Jr, ed. Modern Essays on Eighteenth-Century Literature . New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. xi + 488pp. US$32.50. This volume is neither one thing nor the other, as Winston Churchill said of the surname Bossom. It is not exactly a collection of hidden gems, essays buried in periodicals that ought to be much better known than they are. Half of the contributions are not essays at all, properly speaking, but are extracts from books, several of them so well known and so easily available that the utility of anthologizing them is in doubt: Claude Rawson's Gulliver and the Gentle Reader (Swift); Ian Donaldson's The World Upside-Down (Gay); Irvin Ehrenpreis's Acts of Implication (Pope); John Preston's The Created Self (Fielding); John Richetti's Defoe's Narratives (Defoe). A more successful choice is the excerpt from John Sitter's Literary Loneliness, a very good book not yet as well known as it deserves to be. On the other hand, it is difficult to believe that the articles printed here represent "the best pieces [Damrosch could find], whether widely quoted or less familiar." A top twenty without, for example, Pat Rogers, Donald Greene, James Clifford, Maynard Mack, Margaret Doody, Paul Hunter ... (I have thirtythree names listed on the inside cover of my copy, all of whom have published important articles since 1970). John Preston's The Created Selfwas a very good book in its day, but it has had its day. Surely William Wimsatt's piece on the rhetoric of Swift's poems is not the best article available on the subject? The contribution Damrosch prints by Lawrence Lipking on "Learning to Read Johnson" seems to me to be Lipking out of form, lacking the wit and speculative daring that usually characterizes his work. In a sense, if Damrosch asserts that the articles included here are the best pieces he knows, one cannot contradict him any more than if he asserts that he has a pain in his leg; but we are entitled EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 1, Number 3, April 1989 242 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION to know much more than he tells us about where he has been looking and what criteria he has employed to make the decision. His taciturnity here might provide ammunition to any reader inclined to see the volume as protective, on the whole, of a stable canon and an unreflective critical consensus. And there is, I think, a laxity about this book as a publishing venture that may be indicative of a certain smugness. Aside from its inadequate editorial introduction, it contains no information about contributors, and its scholarly credentials are undermined by the absence of an index. Misprints are epidemic: the one that punctures Marshall Brown's quotation from Young's Night Thoughts on p. 450 is more amusing, perhaps, to British than American readers: Reason pursu'd is Faith; and, unpursu'd Where Poof [sic] invites, 'tis Reason, then no more. On the whole, the volume offers us a canonical spread both of authors covered and critics covering. Contributions on Swift (three), Pope (two), Gay, Defoe (two), Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Steme, Johnson, Boswell, mid-century poetry (two), and Burney give the collection its "set author" identity, and the focus is on the engagement between such set authors and major critics of the American establishment. For another obvious aspect of the volume's sociology, alarming to those of us working on this side of the fish-pond, is that only two contributors live in Britain; Howard Erskine-Hill, whose essay on Pope's life and work is the most explicitly political contribution in the book, and Gillian Beer. I do not mean to imply that this is a collection of turkeys. It is not. There is some excellent material here. But the comparison between this volume and the recent Methuen collection The New Eighteenth Century, edited by Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown, is instructive. Their volume has a new-historicist bias, demonstrating a "theoretically informed interdisciplinarity" that takes on board feminist, Marxist, psychoanalytical, and cultural-political approaches. Even if one is inclined to dismiss this as modish nonsense, one is forced to admit that it...