Sexing the Text: The Rhetoric of Sexual Difference in British Literature, 1700–1750 by Todd C. Parker (review)

57 senting academy that Defoe attended from about 1674 to 1679. These sources did not make Defoe a scientist, but they taught him the value of experiment, observation, and plain speaking in the communication of useful knowledge. Ms. Vickers proves the case for Defoe’s grounding in Baconian science so conclusively that the book may well do for Defoe studies what the landmark studies in the 1960s by G. A. Starr, J. Paul Hunter, and Rodney Baine did—or rather, it may help to undo the effects of their works. Since the 1960s, Defoe has been regarded as a Puritan writer struggling to keep alive the religious tradition of Richard Baxter and Increase Mather in a world increasingly indifferent to God’s plot for it. Ms. Vickers shows that what most interested Defoe was not the supernatural, otherworldly element of Puritanism , but rather the reforming agenda that Puritanism brought to the writing of histories of man, God, and nature. His Puritanism, then, is entirely of this world, an investigation into the nature of things in order to show that the knowledge and use of them is consistent with being a good Christian. Her distillation of ‘‘Baconianism’’into a very few elements—thetestingofallknowledge through experiment and observation; the writing of ‘‘history’’ as a systematic account of a set of phenomena, without regard to time; the preference for things over words, logic, or rhetorical forms as the sources of knowledge; and the use of plain speech as the medium of education—allows her to identify the common ground that Robinson Crusoe shares with such works as A General History of Trade (1713), A New Voyage Round the World (1725), and A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–1726), each of which gets its own chapter. Crusoe is a maker of things, not a mere worshipper of them; his history is ‘‘an allegory of the advancement of learning,’’ but also aspiritualizingofmanufactureandimprovement.Defoe’snonfictionalaccounts of explorations, voyages, and tours also emphasize these virtues but are closer in style to those written by various travelers who had read or been trained by the Baconians who formed the nucleus of the Royal Society. In addition to lessening the insistence on reading Defoe as a writer of religious or moralistic books, Ms. Vickers’s work will create new interest in his minor works, such as The Storm (1704), The Consolidator (1705), A General History of Discoveries and Improvements (1725–1727), and The Complete English Tradesman (1726). These are generally read only for the light they throw on his fiction, but Ms. Vickers regards them as important texts in the transmission of Baconian science to a large and eageraudience. She presents Defoe not as a scientist himself but as a principal figure through whom scientific values entered literary discourse in the first quarter of the century. Geoffrey Sill Rutgers University, Camden TODD C. PARKER. Sexing the Text: The Rhetoric of Sexual Difference in British Literature , 1700–1750. Albany: SUNY, 2000. Pp. x ⫹ 218. $54.50; $17.95 (paper). There is plenty of evidence that the eighteenth century in Britain was a time of tremendous anxiety about gender and sexual difference. In form and content, much of theliteraturerevealsthispreoccupation.Theterms‘‘male’’and‘‘female,’’amongothers, are up for grabs. No sooner has an author set up seemingly safe, carefully opposed 58 content for them than the categories are called into question by another text. Often they are even called into question—deliberately or haplessly—within the same text that originally sought to delineate them. These observations suggest intriguing questions: What about the period, aside from its general fascination with categories, brought sex and gender to the fore as topics? How is this preoccupation reflected in the forms that emerge in the period, most notably the narrative stances of the novel and, later, of the Romantic lyric? What is the relationship between a newly redefined notion of the self-conscious individual and the shifting content of these categories? In how much specificity can we perceive the interaction between literature and the sexual politics of the period? Mr. Parker declares in his Coda that this last question motivates his book. He wants to examine how ‘‘the rhetoric of heterosexual difference...