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REVIEWS 77 For those familiar with Bakhtin's sweeping theories of the novel as a system of languages in dialogue, Gilman's study might seem little more than a modest, if elegantly presented, confirmation of those more dramatically posed views. For diose who are not, Gilman will provide, in a highly readable form, a needed corrective to more traditional and naively representational views of the novel and, in particular, a fresh perspective on Üie Quijote's paradigmatic significance in defining Üie features of that seemingly indefinable genre. Joe Adamson McMaster University Carol Houlihan Flynn. The Body in Swift and Defoe. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. vii + 231pp. US$39.50. Hamlet provides familiar alternative visions of the human body: as a magnificent piece of work, "in form and moving how express and admirable!" or as a quintessence of dust. Carol Houlihan Flynn, in her book on The Body in Swift and Defoe, shows how, by and large, her authors opt for üie latter alternative. The bodies they present are for Üie most part vile ones, quintessences of dust—and worse. She explains the ways in which, for the eighteenth century as represented by these two writers, "the idealized human form was breaking down to become fixed in its infirmities" (p. 15). The bodies they deal with are often dead ones, like the pits full of corpses in 7"Ae Journal of the Plague Year, or at least envisioned as fast becoming dead—like the vast Brobdingnagian beggar-woman wim the cancerous breast. The genesis of üie book, Flynn explains, was Johnson's grisly account of Üie burial of Dryden: of the corpse's interrupted interment, and its embarrassing deterioration when it was left unclaimed at the undertaker's. Her book's nickname while in progress, she engagingly confesses, was "Crazy Carcasses" (p. vi). Bodies are viewed as ineluctably material, as taking up space, as crowding, colliding , corrupting. Their vast and insatiable consumption is a burden on üie state. Their evacuations accumulate. Their eating makes them lustful, and their lust produces more mouths to be fed in a dreary chain of consumption. Their deaths and disposal create further problems, as the corruption of Üie corpses threatens public health, and promotes what Voltaire called "the war of die dead against die living" (p. 24). The living also make war on the dead, consuming them for their own survival, so that one human body gets recycled through anotiier. Defoe occupies die first part of the book, Swift üie second; though the book ranges widely over otiier authors too, including the literary, Üie philosophical, üie medical, and the critical. It is organized by theme rather than by the individual works of Defoe and Swift. The chapter called "The burthen in Üie belly," for instance, which connects consumption and sexuality, deals with Defoe's Conjugal Lewdness, but also touches on Moll Flanders and Roxana, as well as Montesquieu's Persian Letters, and calls in Cornare and Cheyne on diet and longevity. "Consuming desires"—principally on Moll and Roxana—explores the cannibalism motif in the consumer chain of sexuality and survival. "Sexuality leads to children leads to hunger leads to sexuality" (p. 86). This is "a world where one eats or is eaten" (p. 86). Flynn reads attentively, and with an ear highly tuned to metaphor. For instance, here is her reading of the brief episode in Moll Flanders in which Moll during her thieving 78 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 4:1 career proposes to make off with some furniture saved from a fire: "The marital and extramarital bed, that place where the body resists idealization to assert its own material needs, becomes for Defoe a symbol of dislocation so heavy üiat at one point it literally flattens Moll Flanders into the street ... 'It is unie, the Bed being soft it broke no Bones: but as üie weight was great, and made the greater by the Fall, it beat me down, and ... I lay like one Dead and neglected a good while.' To reach orgasm," Flynn continues, "is to die Üie little death" (p. 62). I cannot help being impressed by the ingenuity of the reading. At the same time I find myself resisting, as though...

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