Mind, Body, Motion, Matter: Eighteenth-Century British and French Literary Perspectives ed. by Mary Helen McMurran and Alison Conway (review)

The stimulating articles in this volume present new approaches to some complicated, concepts concerning materialism in the eighteenth century, concepts that have been considered and debated before, but not in this impressive, challenging, and, at times, provocative manner. One of its intentions may well have been to spark more debate and discussion, and it certainly succeeds in doing so. The articles, which are of a uniformly high quality, will appeal to a broad spectrum of interests, aesthetic, literary, philosophical, French, and English.

Divided into two sections, "Pre-Reflective Experience" and "Materialism," the articles ask us to look at some familiar, and some not so familiar, works and ideas in a new light or, perhaps a better metaphor would be, from a new angle. And, at times, we can almost follow in broad stokes the argument from one article to the next. Ruth Mack's "Hogarth: Practical Aesthetics" is an ideal first article as it presents a simple, yet fundamental, look at the dichotomy of ideas that were developing in the eighteenth century. Mack discusses the debate as to whether "design" was a craft or an art, exemplifying Joshua Reynolds and the Royal Society as those believing it to be an art, an art that, they argued, would filter down to the artisan through the likes of drawing studios. By examining William Hogarth's The Analysis of Beauty, Mack concludes that he straddled the debate and teaches us "to think of the way an object (a candlestick, or a piece of wallpaper) could be tied to a cultural world." The next article takes this a step further when Jonathan Krammick, in dealing with theories of perception, argues that Hogarth is again somewhat in the middle of ideas of perception. He points out that Hogarth understood beauty to reside in objective shape, but he (Hogarth) also understood that to view such a shape is to recreate it, not to represent it. Completing this first section are two articles concerned with how we might modify our views on the eighteenth-century's spiritual conscientiousness. David Alvarez says he "reads Locke with a Shaftesburian lens" while examining the Enlightenment's approach to religious tolerance. This is followed by Mary Helen McMurren's article on "Re-thinking Supersititon" and the mythic implications of ceremony and ritual.

The second section, "Materialisms," deals more with literary matters, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, and Denis Diderot. Sara Landreth speaks of Defoe and his view of the mind as an "airy substance" at once static and moving and what this implies with respect to reading, a concept continued by Sarah Ellenzweig in her discussion of materialism in the novel in general and in Clarissa in particular. Her lucid discussion/argument rightly concludes that "materialism has been a neglected source in our understanding of narrative dynamics."

The final two articles point out that the eighteenth century used not only mechanical things to describe the mind but also various forms of "bugs." Both Kate Turnball in her article on Sterne and Joanna Stalmaker in hers on Diderot illustrate that both used the idea of a swarm of bees to explain the relationship of materialism to their ideas. In Sterne's case, the mind and soul were like a swarm of bees or maggots (she helpfully points out that the Oxford English Dictionary and Samuel Johnson defined maggots as a whimsy or caprice of the mind), the irony and comedy typical of Sterne. For Diderot, the swarm of bees is used as an image of the body with the brain as a form of encyclopaedia, some of whose molecules he posits may survive death.

There is a concluding article by Vivasan Soni, "Can Aethestics Overcome Instrumental Reason," which neatly, and coherently, sums up the book. His discussion of John Mandeville's Fable of the Bees (more bees!) is concerned with aesthetics and the dilemma of judgment...