The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry ed. by John Sitter (review)

71 emphasis on vision in the previous chapters , here he attempts (more by assertion than cogent argument) to show how Sterne’s insistence on writing is a reinvention of the oral for a fully literate world: the personal presence of the storyteller becomes the fictional projection of the ‘‘author’’ in his dramatic efforts to communicate through visual language. In Chapter Five, Sterne’s typographical tricks paradoxically preserve aspects of orality—the storyteller’s control of and interaction with the reader—while often thwarting anything but a purely visualapprehension of the text. The metafictional aspects of Sterne’s works are grounded in the special self-reflexivity brought on by the text. Overall, Mr. Tadié wishes to emphasize the hybrid nature of Sterne’s language : oral, written, and printed modes of communication and reception are figured together by means of the oddities of his printed texts. Mr. Tadié is less than persuasive.Many footnotes simply contain quotations from Sterne, not as analytic points, but only as ballast for the text, or as an unexamined, ‘‘see for instance.’’The use of critical literature is often similarly vague (‘‘see X on this topic’’). Much of the contextual theory for Chapters One and Two is French, or of the period following Sterne’s death, whereas Mr. Tadié declines closer engagement with those Sterne likely knew (such as Cicero,Quintilian , Bulwer’s Chirologia, and Thomas Sheridan). By contrast with the primary reading in the first two chapters, the accounts in Chapters Three (especially) through Five are based on a few secondary sources, taken as authoritative. This volume is not well produced. The discussion of A Sentimental Journey’s illustrations , for example, suffers from the lack of reproductions. Bibliographic details are inconsistent and imprecise; especially troubling is the continual confusion of volume and issue numbers for articles. Christopher Fanning Queen’s University, Kingston The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth -Century Poetry, ed. John Sitter. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2001. Pp. xix ⫹ 298. $54.95. Like many of the Cambridge Companions , this volume on eighteenth-century poetry does not comprisepredictable slices—chronological, generic, or topical .Asaninitialblurbannounces,‘‘These specially commissioned essays avoid familiar categories and single-author approaches to look at the century afresh.’’ Such an approach has drawbacks. A book so designed does not do well as a reference work or a resource for novice students , although the term ‘‘companion’’ seems to invite these uses. At least five chapters substantiate the invitation, those on politics (Christine Gerrard), publishing and reading poetry (Barbara Benedict ), women readers and writers (Claudia Thomas Kairoff), poetics (John Sitter),andthelegacyofSpenserandMilton (David Fairer). Others may seem more wayward. For example, Ralph Cohen ’s ‘‘The Return to the Ode’’ apparently focuses on a genre, but ‘‘ode’’turns out to mean ‘‘lyric.’’ We read about sonnets , ballads, Gray’s Elegy Written in a CountryChurchyard,andthenaive,pious effusions that Richardson’s Pamela rhymes. Gray’s own magnificent odesget mentioned here only in passing. Where does one look to orient oneself in a topic other than those with specific essays on them? It is hard to know. Most 72 scholars (rightly) think of verse satire as a form in which eighteenth-century poetry is nonpareil; but in this volume, the only sustained discussion of it is in light of politics. Forms such as parody and mock-heroic? Relations between poetry and plays, novels, and philosophy? Not much. Eighteenth-century poetry was remarkably cosmopolitan as to time and place. Nonetheless, of the classical poets often ‘‘imitated’’ in the eighteenth century , Horace and Virgil are each mentioned on only four scattered pages, Pindar on three, Homer on two, and Juvenal (solelyinconnectionwithJohnson’sLondon ) in a single paragraph. Post-classical continental poetry has onerepresentative, Boileau, on one page, in a sentence that is not about him, while the British poetical past, apart from Spenser, Milton, and Dryden, largely disappears, even the worshiped Shakespeare. The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry will not fairly orient readers who come to it without a working knowledge of eighteenth-century poetry, or provide historical coherence, as my short Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Poetry, 1660–1780, tries to do. The essays, however, will reward readers with such knowledge. None of them treats eighteenth-century poetry as if it had to be...