Libertinage et utopies sous le règne de Louis XIV (review)

88 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION service by sorting Cleland's text into its philological context. The KWIC (KeyWord In Context) program is delightfully simple to use, and produces a helpful, reliable concordance. Its only odd feature is that the order of the entries is alphabetical , which means that the order is determined by the word following the concorded word. Thus "surpris'd and delighted, as any one could be" precedes "and delighted as I was" in the listing for "delighted" even though the former comes in volume II, and the latter early in volume I. The concordance would, I am persuaded, be much more useful if each listed word were given in the order it appears in the book. However that may be, perusal of the concordance reveals that Cleland's language is very much the language of Richardson and Fielding. Not for him the dirty words ofthe pornographer; everything is poeticized, euphemized, and sentimentalized : Cleland sanitizes Fanny's linguistic environment just as he sanitized the sociological. Indeed, it comes as a small surprise that Cleland could write such a novel with such rigorous avoidance of any of the argot terms for sexuality . The computer concordance is beyond question a useful tool for analysing Cleland's prose. And Preston very truly says, "There is, after all, no reader more relentless concerning textual detail than a computer" (p. xiii). Nonetheless , it is a limited and very expensive tool. These days there are much more sophisticated programs available, such as Wordcruncher or Textsearch, which will not only concord a machine-readable text, but perform a number of analytical functions as well on the text's linguistic structures. Increasingly flexible and powerful free-form databases are also becoming available. What is urgently needed, then, is not more printed concordances, but more reliable texts available in machine-readable form. Antony Hammond McMaster University Lise Leibacher-Ouvrard. Libertinage et utopies sous le règne de Louis XTV. Genève et Paris: Librairie Droz (Histoire des idées et critique littéraire, No 267), 1989. 241pp. Although in her introduction Lise Leibacher-Ouvrard speaks of the obscurity of such imaginary voyages cum utopias as La Terre australe connue (1676) by Gabriel de Fbigny, L'Histoire des Sévarambes (1677-79) by Denis Veiras, L'Histoire de Caléjava (1700) by Claude Gilbert, the Voyages et avantures de Jaques Massé (1714?) by Simon Tyssot de Patot, and La République des philosophes (170?) attributed to Fontenelle, the impressive list she provides of books and articles devoted to these works over the last fifty years, either singly, REVIEWS 89 collectively, or in general discussions of the Utopian tradition, would suggest that they are not totally neglected. Her thesis, and it is a valid one, is that because they all conform to the basic formula proposed by More (the voyage from Europe to unknown parts, the discovery, through being shipwrecked, of an isolated and "ideal" society, the description of that society, and the eventual return to Europe), these authors and their texts have been too frequently and unjustifiably lumped together. According to the author, the scholar mainly responsible for imposing such uniformity on this disparate set of writers was Frédéric Lachèvre, who, in one of his seminal works on libertines and their writings, Les Successeurs de Cyrano de Bergerac (1922), was largely concerned to show that Fbigny, Veiras, Gilbert and Tyssot were dissolute individuals who filled their works with deistic and sacrilegious ideas. Mme Leibacher-Ouvrard's book is, in a sense, a refutation of the arguments of Lachèvre. Her object is to highlight not the similarities but the differences to be found among these four authors to whom, for good measure, she has added Fontenelle. It is, of course, much easier to point out what these writers have in common than where they differ. Indeed, after reading a dozen or so of these Utopian escapades one after another (an ordeal not to be undertaken lightly), one is hard put to remember who said what about the topography, history, language, religion, education, politics and economics of which imaginary country, all of which merge into the haziest of blurs. So Leibacher-Ouvrard performs a most useful and...