New Essays on Diderot ed. by James Fowler (review)

Diderot scholars and dix-huitiémistes will be delighted with this excellent addition to the secondary literature on the Enlightenment's chef de file. The volume contains essays on all strands of Diderot's work, from the philosophical writings to the novels and dialogues, plays, and dramatic theory to his writings on music, which included radical proposals for the operatic genre. There is also a rare examination of his contributions to art criticism. Of particular interest here is Diderot's fascination with the practice of ekphrasis, and theoretical concerns with copies of an original, although it is surprising that Tom Baldwin's stimulating discussion ignores Jacques Derrida's thoughts on mimesis. Fowler's subdivision of essays according to genre appears both logical and 'user-friendly', but his separation of 'Diderot the Philosophe' from sections on the novels and dialogues could be thought to be problematic. There are clear crossovers, for example, between Anthony Strugnell's essay 'Diderot's Anti-Colonialism' in Part I and Andrew Curran's more focused discussion of the Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville in Part III. Part I, however, does have the merit of laying the philosophical ground, so to speak, for the genre-based sections that follow. Many of these essays will prove excellent teaching aids as well as invaluable contributions to the research corpus. Daniel Brewer's clear and detailed examination of innovation in the Encyclopédie manages to be as accessible as it is original, while Kate Tunstall's cinematically titled 'Eyes Wide Shut: Le Rêve de d'Alembert', which challenges the received view that Diderot completely rejects Berkeleyan scepticism, shakes the dust off a fascinating and important question. James Fowler re-examines the influence of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa on La Religieuse, persuasively arguing that the latter is consistently critical of religious belief and institutions, while Clarissa, which Diderot had read and admired, is, Fowler suggests, anti-religious malgré lui. It is also pleasing to read a contribution on Diderot's oft-ignored 'obscene' early novel Les Bijoux indiscrets, which, as Anne Deneys-Tunney rightly insists, is of some philosophical importance and fully deserves to be ranked alongside the more mature works. This reading focuses on the problem of language and its relation to reality— certainly a proper subject for discussion—but, given the novel's history of critical censorship, it seems regrettable that the author appears so scrupulously to avoid issues, central to this work, of sex, sexuality, and sexism. After all, as Angelica Goodden's entertaining and informative account of the affinities and divergences in Diderot's relationship with Rousseau makes clear, the editor of the Encyclopédie was much more of a bon vivant than his puritanical Genevan friend.