Compendious Conversations (review)

102 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 6:1 meet a despotic mother in Allainville's L'Ecole des bourgeois, the same year as La Mère rivale. Again, the fact that a heroine of Mme Leprince de Beaumont chooses to keep her child bom out of wedlock "confirme la réalité d'un rapport nouveau de la mère à son enfant" (p. 342). It is apparently assumed that things happen "dans la vie" as they happen "dans la littérature." However, this is a minor weakness in a valuable study. The relation of literature to life is admittedly a difficult matter, and it can hardly be treated adequately in a study which already has a sufficiently vast subject. The book is very well researched and documented and conforms to the usual high standards of the Studies on Voltaire series. It should be in any serious library. Nancy Senior University of Saskatchewan Kevin L. Cope, ed. Compendious Conversations. Anglo-American Studies, no. 4. Frankfurt am Main, Bern, New York and Paris: Peter Lang, 1992. xiv + 424pp. US$78.60. ISBN 3-631-43714-5. Kevin Cope makes a better read than most scholarly writers in part because, as CS. Lewis once said of Addison, he "wants to hear about everything" and in part because, again like Addison, he reports on what he hears with such unapologetic verve. Readers of Cope's Criteria of Certainty (1990) are familiar with Cope's vibrant curiosity, and readers of the present collection will find the same quality in Cope's editorial work. In his telegraphic but wide-ranging foreword on the "militant asystemacity" of what we once called "Augustanism," Cope finds yesterday's "simplifying taxonomists" and today's post-deconstructionists and new historicists gripped by the rage for order; he peppers his genial assault with references to Hume, Blake, Kurt Godei, Benoit Mandelbrot, Donald Greene, the old Berlin Wall, sundry unspecified subatomic particles, and something that Cope—after Blake, sort of—calls "&c.-edness" (p. xiii). For all his allusiveness, however, Cope never lets us lose sight of the probity behind his dizzying prose. Understandably, the volume does not always sustain the promise of its conception, as is perhaps evident from Joel Weinsheimer's afterword, in which Weinsheimer's elegant comments on Descartes, Locke, and Hume seem rather to correct the terms of the debate by assigning historical specificity to them than to validate the debate by drawing new meaning from it. Still, the collection has much to offer students of fiction and of fictionwriters . Olga Costopoulos-Almon and Carl Kropf apply Bakhtin, respectively, to Smollett's characters and to Fielding's Joseph Andrews. Costopoulos-Almon arrays Smollett's novels according to the extent to which their characters correspond to Bakhtin's ideas about dialogism. The essay is best as a new take on the old question of what is "greatest" about Smollett's greatest novel: in the "polyphonic" Humphry Clinker (p. 193), the narrator cedes his place to the novel's various characters and so allows Smollett to "achieve oneness with [his characters] and with the reader" (p. 204). Although the thought that Smollett's career tends triumphantly towards the realization of Bakhtin's theories will irritate some readers, the essay is not less interesting for its limited theoretical scope. Kropf uses Bakhtin to attack the notion of "unity" in the heteroglossic Joseph Andrews (a notion fostered by Fielding, although Kropf does not say so). Like Costopoulos-Almon, Kropf considers Bakhtinian polyphony the measure of a novel's appeal; like Cope and REVIEWS 103 many other current critics, he regards narrative disorder as an invitation rather than an embarrassment . Perhaps, Kropf seems to suggest, the qualities that Coleridge (and Battestin) admired in Tom Jones are not ones that speak to the postmodern sensibility. A more literal sense of dialogue inspires Jenene Allison's essay on female dialogists in Laclos's Les Liasons dangereuses, Diderot's La Religieuse, and Marivaux's La Vie de Marianne. Allison demonstrates that the female character's position as object of, participant in, or initiator of dialogue largely fixes her status within or without society (p. 277). Gender, language, and power are the topics as well of Jennifer Georgia's "The Joys of...