Eighteenth-Century Genre and Culture: Serious Reflections on Occasional Forms: Essays in Honor of J. Paul Hunter ed. by Dennis Todd and Cynthia Wall (review)

66 opposition to an expanding and suspect literary market and ‘‘circulating’’ libraries ; our ‘‘close reading’’ is really another way of talking about ‘‘deep reading.’’ Here Ms. Lynch builds on work like that of Clifford Siskind and Jon Klancher, which she cites, and Martha Woodmansee —in The Author, Art, and the Market —which she doesn’t. Because Ms. Lynch actually gives us adensesocialand cultural context—from Garrick’s mechanical wigs to ballroom etiquette and eighteenth-century copy machines—she demonstrates in critical practice what she advocates in theory: a greater attention to the ways the literary and social both oppose and define each other. Though one might quibble with her points or readjust emphases, she has made her book about reading both readable and important. This is a worthy winner of the MLA’s 1999 award for the best first book. Elizabeth W. Harries Smith College Eighteenth-Century Genre and Culture: Serious Reflections on Occasional Forms: Essays in Honor of J. Paul Hunter , ed. Dennis Todd and Cynthia Wall. Newark: Delaware, 2001. Pp. vi ⫹ 301. $47.50. This collection honors a distinguished scholar, and the essays are without exception worthy. Three essays are exemplary for their systematic arguments, which combine new ideas with the thoughtful uses of previous scholarship. Martin C. Battestin reassesses the basis for Johnson’sderogationofFielding,specifically of Tom Jones. His compelling survey and argument show what Fielding and Johnson shared and their sharp differences, including the insult Johnson must have suffered in reading Tom Jones. John O’Brien analyzes ‘‘plot’’ in the plays of Susannah Centlivre in relation to Levi-Strauss’s perception that the exchange represented by marriage reflects the ‘‘transition from nature to culture .’’The plots of intrigue comedydramatize the ‘‘force of patriarchal resistance to the social’’ and thus the liabilities to culture of a patriarchal system ‘‘that seemed to offer little but obstruction, even death.’’ His stimulating reflection extends plot well beyond Centlivre’s work. Timothy Dykstal focuses on Fielding ’s Amelia in the context of Stoic moral and Lockean educational theories. For Fielding, the mere promulgation of rules will not produce moral conduct, which will be successfully achieved only by the sustained inculcation of habit. Mr. Dykstal carefully acknowledges inconsistencies with this outlook in Fielding’s novel as well as exemplifications of it. Two additional essays are focused on single authors.JohnRichettiadvancesthe unexceptionable view that ‘‘Crusoe is . . . the result in narrative terms of precisely the problem of secular versus religious perspectives, which is in practice not an obstacle to self-understanding and realization but one of a number of means of articulating an identity.’’ However, his conclusion that Crusoe moves on ‘‘to confident internalization and effective appropriation of the religious frame of reference’’ needs qualification: the final pages of Robinson Crusoe prepare for the unraveling of the implications of homecoming and lead to the anomie represented in The Farther Adventures. Joseph M. Levine’s essay on Swift will be of most interest to those who have not read his excellent The Battleof theBooks:History and Literature in the Augustan Age. Sections III and IV of the essay relate Temple’s and Swift’s forays into the writing of history to eighteenth-century practices . 67 In ‘‘Enlightenment Fiction and theScientific Hypothesis,’’ John Bender argues that probabilistic fiction eroded the distinction between hypotheses and facts, a distinction already difficult for experimental science. But after the middle of the eighteenth century, the novel claimed to represent a higher than strictly literal truth and thus allowed the reinstatement of the difference between scientific truth and fictional truths. Mr. Bender concludes : ‘‘against the backdrop of a commitment shared by the two realms to the system of verisimilitude, the novel began to ground science’s claim to be nonfiction by becoming increasingly the domain of manifest though probable fictionality .’’ The essay analyzes well the difficulties of Enlightenment science in eschewing hypotheses and its resulting difficulties in purging itself of fictions. I am not, however, persuadedthatthenovel does all the heavy lifting that Mr. Bender assigns to it. Nevertheless there are heuristic benefits in considering the novel in the context of the important dichotomy between fact and fiction. In ‘‘The Novel Before Novels,’’ Kathryn R. King argues plausibly that the fiction of...