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Reviewed by:
  • Robinson Crusoe, and: Amelia, and: Clarissa: An Abridged Edition, and: A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy
  • Elizabeth Kraft (bio)
Four Broadview Press editions
Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe, ed. Evan R. Davis. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2010. 422pp. US$13.95. ISBN 978-1-55111-935-9.
Amelia by Henry Fielding, ed. Linda Bree. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2010. 550pp. US$26.95. ISBN 978-1-55111-345-6.
Clarissa: An Abridged Edition by Samuel Richardson, ed. Toni Bowers and John Richetti. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2011. 808pp. US$24.95. ISBN 978-1-55111-475-0.
A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy by Laurence Sterne, ed. Katherine Turner. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2010. 264pp. US$15.95. ISBN 978-1-55111-888-8.

Someday, someone will write a brilliant essay on the nineteenth-century photographs chosen to grace the covers of Broadview editions of eighteenth-century novels. The haunting images seem to emerge from a cultural consciousness partly formed by the very texts they now obliquely, but often profoundly, illustrate. It is as though the photographers' imaginations (and, thus, ways of seeing) had been formed and informed by the books in question. And no doubt they had. Whether acknowledged or not, eighteenth-century fiction is responsible for many of the mental images metaphorically associated with modern life: a deserted island, a rundown tenement, a girl alone reading, a busy city street.

The texts under consideration here are Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, edited by Evan Davis; Henry Fielding's Amelia, edited by Linda Bree; Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, abridged and edited by Toni Bowers and John Richetti; and Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey, edited by Katherine Turner. All seek to define their niche in the world of classroom texts by careful attention to copy-text, intelligent—though not obtrusive—annotation, and inclusion of significant contextual materials to aid or direct instructors in historicizing or theorizing discussion. Each edition includes a biographical and critical introduction as well as a bibliography that points to the most important critical commentary on the text in question.

Of course, all these novels appear in other paperback editions. I have used both the Penguin and the Norton Critical Robinson Crusoe multiple times, the Penguin complete Clarissa and the Riverside abridged Clarissa (now out of print, but available as a Kindle e-book) a couple of times each, and the Penguin and the 2006 Hackett/Cambridge A Sentimental Journey. I have not ordered an edition of Amelia; the one time I taught the novel, in 1992, library editions supplied the small graduate seminar, while I used the edition from which I studied in the [End Page 295] early 1980s—the one-volume Everyman edition. Still, had I needed a class text, one existed, and still exists, in the Penguin Classics series.

In other words, these Broadview editions are not supplying a bereft market so much as they are defining a niche within that market, each in its own way. Davis's Robinson Crusoe does so quite powerfully. For those, like me, who teach Defoe's novel on an almost-yearly basis, the prospect of adopting a new text is not one of unalloyed delight. My lectures are coded to the pagination of the two editions I have employed repeatedly. I have my favorite extra-textual materials, which I assign or supply depending on which classroom text I am using in the term in question. I rely on introductory statements that have become as familiar to me as the novel itself. All that said, the Broadview Robinson Crusoe should be a "classroom contender" for all who teach this novel. It will be for me.

The appendices in this edition offer a panoply of contextualizing materials, from castaway narratives to meditations on solitude, from eighteenth-century economic theory to Defoe's comments on slavery and trade, from classic texts on cannibalism to emotive illustrations of Friday's rescue. Although the Broadview "context" philosophy seems in other instances geared to a placing of the text in a specific historical moment, the Robinson Crusoe materials helpfully extend the moment through Marx and Engels, Cruikshank and Phiz, Wordsworth and Coleridge. Such an extension is appropriate as this text hit a...

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