Transatlantic Stories and the History of Reading, 1720–1810: Migrant Fictions by Eve Tavor Bannet (review)

The works Ms. Bannet studies in this rewarding book are transatlantic in subject, authorship, and distribution. These stories, which purport to be based on fact, also range widely from the canonical to the formerly popular but now unfamiliar. Ms. Bannet reminds us that the border between factual and fictional histories in these “migrant fictions” was very porous in the eighteenth century, and that consequently much of what contemporaneous readers learned about the Atlantic world came from sources that were epistemologically questionable. Her primary concerns are reception history, the history of the book, and the history of reading. She notes that to assume that many eighteenth-century texts are the products of autonomous, identifiable single authors would be to evaluate them from an anachronistic post-Romantic perspective because “during the eighteenth century, texts were often altered, reworded, epitomized, re-compiled, renamed, adapted, repositioned, reinterpreted, recontextualized or reframed, in the course of reprinting and embodiment in different material books.”

Publishers and printers were part of the interpretive community along with authors and readers. Consequently, the “conventional linear trajectory based on the novels’ first publication date must be supplemented by the novels’ diverse afterlives, by the zigzagging complexities of Atlantic history, by the many ways stories were reframed or altered by British and American editors and printers, and by each story’s multiple local and transatlantic temporalities. … [A] story reprinted in a different version, in a different literary market place, or decades after its first issue, figured in an entirely different literary, social and historical constellation from that in which it had figured on its first appearance.”

Succeeding chapters illustrate how productive Ms. Bannet’s capacious sense of reception history can be. They serve as a model for others to follow. We tend to forget that “[m]ore men and women on both sides of the Atlantic knew Crusoe through epitomes [abridgments] than through Defoe’s narrative.” Ms. Bannet demonstrates the extent to which such epitomes were acts of interpretation engaged in a conversation with Defoe that long outlived him. Epitomes added to, as well as subtracted from, the original text. At a time when Britain’s subsequent dominance in the upper-Atlantic world seemed uncertain, some early epitomes of Crusoe removed Defoe’s triumphalist providential rhetoric to emphasize instead “a representative of the often victimized British common man … [who] risked danger, capture and death for a livelihood, to see the world, or for a place to settle, in a multinational Atlantic world, where everyone was enslaving everyone and Britain’s dominion of the seas was not yet assured.”

Some epitomizers enhanced the historical and circum-Atlantic context of Defoe’s story with added ethnographic and geographical details and by de-emphasizing the isolation and selfreflection of an island-bound Crusoe so central to contemporary readings of the novel as a spiritual autobiography or an account of homo economicus. Epitomizers “changed the meanings of key scenes and, with them, the ideology of the whole,” revising the text, for example, so that Crusoe’s original familial disobedience would not seem to be rewarded by material success. Later abridgers increasingly foregrounded the subject of circum-Atlantic slavery in Crusoe’s story, following the precedent set by Charles Gildon when Crusoe first appeared in 1719. The evolving changes in the representations of slavery reflected the developing arguments about the transatlantic slave trade later in the century.

Changing eighteenth-century attitudes toward slavery and non-Europeans are also central to Ms. Bannet’s discussion of Aubin’s The Noble Slaves (1722) and the paratexts that framed its subsequent reprintings. The popularity of genuine contemporaneous memoirs of Europeans held captive on the Barbary Coast of Africa or by Indians in North America gave Aubin and others the opportunity to imagine women-centered, circum-Atlantic captivity narratives that raise controversial issues such as the definition of female virtue, the value of disguise, the justification of interracial marriage, and the morality of slavery. Later American publishers of...