Historical Boundaries, Narrative Forms: Essays on British Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century in Honor of Everett Zimmerman ed. by Lorna Clymer and Robert Mayer (review)

48 Historical Boundaries, Narrative Forms: Essays on British Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century in Honor of Everett Zimmerman, ed. Lorna Clymer and Robert Mayer. Newark: Delaware , 2007. Pp. xviii ⫹ 250. $53.50. In 1727, Swift joined Pope, Gay, and Arbuthnot in the anonymous collaborative production of Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (1727 to 1732), which later included Matthew Pilkington and Thomas Sheridan. Miscellanies had long been popular (Swift had published his own in 1711), but this collaborative Scriblerian specimen started a rash that continued for the rest of the century. Historical Boundaries, Narrative Forms, an homage to Everett Zimmerman , who died in 2003, consists of twelve essays divided into two groups, ‘‘Boundaries’’ and ‘‘Forms,’’ that reflect Zimmerman’s scholarly interests. Zimmerman would likely have been both honored and amused by the effort to shape the contributions to a miscellany in his honor by formulating and bounding the topics of form and boundary. Maximillian Novak’s ‘‘Edenic Desires: Robinson Crusoe, the Robinsonade, and Utopias’’ nimbly surveys how Defoe’s novel manifests three related fictional forms (the utopia, the quest for the new paradise, and the Robinsonade) which were themselves governed by strict generic distinctions, but it betrays the categorical imperative of the collection. Exploring the boundaries that shape generic classification, it just as resolutely interrogates the history of literary forms and repeatedly intimates how boundaries necessarily entail their own drift from clear lines of demarcation. Ms. Clymer and Mr. Mayer recognize the inherent difficulties of their project, acknowledging that the divisions they have created ‘‘are not unbreachable,’’ but it is tempting nonetheless to imagine some of the entries migrating across the boundaries the editors have set. In terms of topics—which range from such interests as the rhetoric of privateering in Woodes Rogers’s A Cruising Voyage Round the World (1712), the surprising similarities between Bishop Gilbert Burnet ’s autobiographical History of My Own Time (posthumously published in 1724 and 1734) and Fielding’s prose fiction, and the interactions between image and text in Gibbon and Richardson to concerns about the function of authorship, reading, and textual commodification in the forty-eight volume Magnum edition of Scott’s Waverley Novels (1829–1833), the satiric purposes of gigantism in The Castle of Otranto , and the late eighteenth-century popularity of the cottage ornée—the possibility that a subject such as the fabricated decrepitude of the cottage ornée would be better suited to the section on ‘‘Boundaries’’ rather than ‘‘Forms’’ is sometimes hard to resist. Similarly, the methodological approaches of the contributions vary, from the taxonomic, as in Alan Chalmers’s study of the differences between Thomas Pennant’s obsessively itemized narration in A Tour in Scotland and the Hebrides (1774, 1776) and Johnson’s sleeker and more famous Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (‘‘Scottish Prospects: Thomas Pennant , Samuel Johnson, and the Possibilities of Travel’’), to the explicitly theoretical , as in Robert Erickson’s witty and knowledgeable treatment of an author ’s textual self-awareness (‘‘Swift’s Dark Materials’’). Both of these, however , represent a cottage industry within the collection that might be labeled ‘‘The History of the Book’’ and thus re- 49 flect a currently critical interest. For the most part, however, the essays share the generational issues that Zimmerman would have recognized and embraced. As a reflection of his diverse influence on students and colleagues, Historical Boundaries, Narrative Forms provides a compelling synopsis of Zimmerman ’s intellectual concerns. As an act of camaraderie, it also reveals some of what Pope, writing about his collaboration with Swift in the Miscellenanies, called ‘‘conversing interchangeably, and walking down hand in hand to posterity; not in the stiff forms of learned Authors, flattering each other, and setting the rest of mankind at nought: but in a free, natural , easy manner; diverting others just as we diverted our selves.’’ As a picture of current scholarly work, this book is inevitably less than cohesive, were that even its intention. Some readers will find certain essays, such as Frank Palmeri ’s cogent assessment of ‘‘The History of Fables and Cultural History in England, 1650–1750,’’ tightly woven analyses of independent merit that would sit comfortably in one of the specialized journals in the...