Wrestling with Defoe: Approaches from a Workshop on Defoe’s Prose ed. by Marialuisa Bignami (review)

84 tobiography and a fruitful criticalmethod that alerts readers to the complex ambiguities and subversive potential of literary texts. Sara Soncini University of Genoa Wrestling with Defoe: Approaches from a Workshop on Defoe’s Prose, ed. Marialuisa Bignami. Bologna: CisalpinoMonduzzi , 1997. Pp. 200. ⫽ C23; $20. This is a collection of eight varied essays —the proceedings of a seminar held at Genoa University in 1996. Through a comparison with Locke’s Two Treatises of Governmentand Hobbes’sDeCiveand Leviathan, Sara Soncini illustrates how Defoe’s description of the rise of a political societyismostlygroundedonHobbesian assumptions in Robinson Crusoe, whereas in The Farther Adventures, in which a more articulated society is described , Defoe’s views turn to Locke’s political model. Lidia De Michelis examines the critical debate concerning coherence —‘‘lack’’ versus ‘‘presence’’—in Captain Singleton. Rejecting the idea of a strictly self-contained coherence in Defoe ’s novels (as well as in early eighteenth -century fiction), she speaks of ‘‘cohesion,’’ as a clue to interpretation. She ably traces the way movement is linked to moral values, suggesting an equation between movement and improvement : following Captain Singleton ’s movements, the reader can see his progress from bare practical shrewdness to adult self-awarenessandmoralgrowth. In Memoirs of a Cavalier, Defoe employed the autobiographic mode within a background of historical events, such as the Thirty Years War and the EnglishCivil War, in order to create a flexible character to set at the center of the narration. Ms. Bignami lucidly delineates how the Cavalier turns from a simple fighter to an intelligent eyewitness, thanks to his education and apprenticeship in life in the first part of his autobiography (roughly corresponding to part one of the novel). The exemplars King Gustavus Adolphus and King Charles I stand both as stimulating elements in the Cavalier’s growth and as uniting features of the hero’s life story and of the narration itself. Exploring ‘‘generic’’ influences on Memoirs of a Cavalier and Memoirs of an English Officer, Mara Logaldo sees the modern novel as a syncretic compound , the ‘‘alchemic’’outcome of a process of appropriation of preexisting narrative forms. She analyzes the two novels in relation to how the epic forms the relation between the author and the reader, between the novel and history, between reality and invention. The legacy of autobiography , diary, travel books, and the picaresque is covered. As opposed to the tenaciousnotionthat Moll Flanders consists of nothing but a patchwork of episodes, Alessandro Vescovi shows the cohesive role that diegetic nodal points play in the plot by the repetition of the same patterns in groups of episodes, asserting that the organization is linked by the recurrent presence and development of characters. He tracesother elements of structural complexity and thematic unity in the disparity between the time of action and the time of narration . Through a close examination of the contradictions of Moll’s moral reports, of her ambivalence in judging her past misdeeds , and of her inner change in the Newgate conversion episode, Giuliana Iannàccaro argues that the novel does not have a coherent religious structure providing a theological/teleological frame to the whole. She claims that the moral significance of the novel—strongly 85 stressed from its very beginning—may be more clearly inferred by taking into account the idea of fragmentation, which is in line with the episodic nature of the narrative and with didactic statements in the Preface. The two final papers discuss Roxana. Carlo Pagetti shows how subtly Defoe’s ambiguities help to build the main character into an icon of triumphant femininity , ironically turning a story of female corruption and repentance into a story of male desire and illusion. Angelo Canavesi ’s emphasis on process explores Roxana ’s artistic representation through language in relation to the dichotomy story/ history. The ambiguity of the text arises from changes in its linguistic level; two series of recurrent keywords turn ambiguous because their literal meaning is altered in accordancewiththecontexttothe point of creating a subtle process of semantic escape. Marta Bardotti University of Pisa ROY PORTER. The Creation of the Modern World: the Untold Story of the British Enlightenment. New York and London: Norton, 2000. Pp. xxiv ⫹ 728. $35. Was there a British Enlightenment different...