Eighteenth-Century Contexts: Historical Inquiries in Honor of Phillip Harth ed. by Howard D. Weinbrot, Peter J. Schakel, and Stephen E. Karian (review)

56 Eighteenth-Century Contexts: Historical Inquiries in Honor of Phillip Harth, ed. Howard D. Weinbrot, Peter J. Schakel, and Stephen E. Karian. Madison: Wisconsin, 2001. Pp. xvii ⫹ 305. $21.95. No theme ties the essays in this volume together. Nor do these essays directly engage the work of the man they honor, Phillip Harth. Instead the editors seem to have pulled offtheunlikely—Iwouldhavethoughtitimpossible—featofhonoringHarthbyfinding 15 contributors, many of them major figures in eighteenth-century studies, to present detailed historical contexts that reveal something not known before or that makes us rethink something we thought we already understood historically. In thiswaytheeditors have honored Harth’s own method of historical research. One cannot quibble with their point that Harth’s historical method is an attempt to reject a priori positions, and after delving deep into the history suggested by a literary work such as A Tale of a Tub, to come back to read the work freshly informed about its political, religious, and social contexts. And this extremely moderately priced volume is one you will want to have on the shelf just above your desk. Each of the fifteen essays here demands and deserves careful consideration. In the first essay, James A. Winn discusses musical dissonance, in which, by emphatically rejecting a teleological reading of the history of dissonance, he opens the way to a multilayered discussion of attempts to produce similar effects in poetry. Because ‘‘poetry cannot be truly polyphonic,’’ according to Mr. Winn, ‘‘poetic dissonance must be imagined’’ (emphasis in original). Here a complex musical history meets a complex history of poetry in a shockingly lucid exposition of each and their intersections. At the end of the volume, Eric Rothstein importantly—if not always lucidly—wants to ‘‘reroute’’ the history of British literary history. Civic logic, that is, literary criticism supported by theological or political values and/or hierarchies and ‘‘obediencegrounded ethics,’’underlies,accordingtoMr.Rothstein,‘‘nearlyallpostclassicalliterarytheory until Dryden.’’ Personal logic, that is, a literary theory with variable values that serve individuals, ‘‘underlies all innovations in literary theory after Dryden until 1800.’’With literary theory in its civic mode flowing in one direction, and in its personal mode, in another, understood by way of a ‘‘market strategy,’’ Mr. Rothstein proposes a model of the history of literary theory that better understands the historical periods in which the theories emerged and to which they respond. Six essays deal with Swift. Claude Rawson takes on the thorny issue of the literary and philosophical relationship between Swift and Mandeville, concluding thaton‘‘substantive issues’’ they ‘‘were very close’’; his thoroughness makes this a point of departure for the pair. Clarifying the relationship between More’s Utopia and Swift’s Travels, Hermann Real skillfully shows not that Swift’s work is in any traditional sense utopian, but both Utopia and the Travels employ paradoxes that are generative of deep thought and debate. Perhaps no essay in this volume better captures the Harth method than Frank Ellis’s essay on Swift’s satirical rewriting of Anthony Collins’s Discourse of Free-Thinking. Swift’s work fell flat in his own time, did not surface again until long after his death, and has received little attention since. To explain what Swift was doing, Mr.Ellislocates both works in the context of eighteenth-century religious and political discourses. In a few pages, Mr. Ellis tracks Swift’s move from Whig to Tory with more clarity and 57 certainty than has ever been done before. Not content to enrich Swift, Mr. Ellis rescues Collins from the one-dimensional image Swift would like us to have. James Woolley goes to dazzling historical and textual depths to demonstrate that ‘‘The Whimsical Medley,’’ a three-volume manuscript miscellany in the TCD library, is a wonderful source for poetry of the period, but not as a source for further new attributions to Swift’s poems. Mr. Schakel demonstrates convincingly that the longstanding editorial practice of separating Swift’s Market Hill poems fromthechronology of his poetry has obscured the nature and significance of Swift’s move from a monophonic to a polyphonic poet. This is now the essay I will give graduate students as we begin our study of Swift’s poetry. Michael Conlon argues...