The Text of Great Britain: Theme and Design in Defoe’s Tour by Pat Rogers (review)

140 ticism than others, nearly all are agreed that the heroine needs educating and that the best mentor is the one who will allow her some freedom. A contrasting figure, the ‘‘ideal patriarch ,’’ Sir Charles Grandison, is a point of reference for Richardson’s successors, but his invulnerable rightness is not echoed in the women’s heroes, who are valued for the imperfections that allow the heroine to escape being locked in a posture of eternal gratitude to them. In their portraits of mentors who sometimes get it wrong, as well as their more direct criticisms of the abuses of paternal power, women novelists are imagining alternatives to the cultural models of their time. They are seeking accommodation with patriarchy, not its overthrow, but they do create ‘‘a set of quiet resistances to the idea that the rational autonomous self must be gendered as primarilymale.’’Ms. Wikborg’s comprehensive and illuminating work shows that there is still a place for separate studies of women novelists in this period, revealing the specific quality of the woman writer’s desire. Jane Spencer University of Exeter PAT ROGERS. The Text of Great Britain: Theme and Design in Defoe’s Tour. Newark : Delaware, 1998. Pp. 247. $40.50. In the twenty-five years that Mr. Rogers has been working on Defoe’s Tour Thro’ Great Britain, his intent has been to show that this travel book is a work of literary art, rather than (as most of its predecessors in the genre were) a mere jumble of place-names and associated facts, or a self-centered account of the author ’s rambles. The genre of travel writing as an art form, Mr. Rogers contends, began with Defoe’s fictional construction of some thirteen ‘‘circuits’’through England , Wales, and Scotland, for which the author drew equally on his reading, his own travels, and his imagination. Even skepticsmustnowadmitthejusticeofMr. Rogers’s claim that the Tour is ‘‘the true English epic,’’a dramatization of Defoe’s ‘‘sense of the British nation, in all its fullness and its contrasting moods.’’ Mr. Rogers proves his claim by examining Defoe’s method of composition, rhetorical structures, and literary allusions . Although Defoe accumulated the materials for the book over many years, he ‘‘spread a patina of contemporaneity’’ over the text, giving it ‘‘the impression of a here and now.’’To watch Defoe at work, says Mr. Rogers, ‘‘is to catch high literary craftsmanship in the very act.’’ The association of Defoe and ‘‘high literary craftsmanship’’ will surprise many readers . Though Defoe aspired to create a literary text, the purpose of his craft was, in truth, to forward an ideology of trade and commerce, rather than the idle pleasures of literary art. He played on variations of a binary opposition between decay and growth to construct a rhetoric of improvement, and he compiled a ‘‘sheer multiplicity’’ of images of repletion to emphasize the unparalleled wealth and power of the British nation. Even his frequent allusions to Virgil or to Rome had an antipastoral edge, a distrust of the merely beautiful that was not also prosperous and fruitful. To ‘‘tour’’ England with Defoe was not only to gaze on the beauties or curiosities of the natural world, but to inventory all that was truly wonderful in the works of human nature, especially its architecture, its civil government , and its circulation of goods. This study of Defoe’s Tour shows what a good writer Defoe really was. Geoffrey Sill Rutgers University Camden ...