Engendering Legitimacy: Law, Property, and Early Eighteenth-Century Fiction by Susan Paterson Glover (review)

71 lic’s beliefs and opinions. As they go about their business, the members of this class label one another, and find themselves labeled in turn, cynics.’’ Mr. Mazella covers well-trodden ground in discussing Burke’s ‘‘famously chivalric descriptions of Marie Antoinette.’’ His Bibliography of approximately 300 items does not list one of the best such discussions, Paul Fussell’s in The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism (1965). The author and his press have produced a clean and elegant book. When Mr. Mazella does repeat himself, it is with subtle variation and often with an acknowledgment, for example, that he knows he has used a quotation previously . He has written a book that assumes the reader is working from beginning to end, not just skimming or fishing into the text with the index as a guide. Furthermore he has avoided misleading oversimplifications. He points out that the original, uppercase Cynicism was often associated with a ‘‘snarling ,’’ ‘‘masculine’’ identity, as opposed to the more modern, lowercase cynicism ’s ‘‘sneering’’ and ‘‘femininity,’’ but his study has more complex issues in mind, as both his Introduction and Epilogue make clear. Finally, I credit Mr. Mazella for a politically neutral book. After the Introduction ’s mention of the debasement of contemporary political rhetoric and its epigraph from Richard Nixon’s second Watergate speech, I feared a liberal bias . There was none. One may quarrel slightly with Mr. Mazella’s emphasis on the role of cynicism in causing the shameful political rhetoric we hear today. What I would call simple demagoguery is, from Mr. Mazella’s point of view, a manifestation of much more: ‘‘the postrhetorical, post-Enlightenment intellectual’s acts of persuasion could be stigmatized as ‘cynical’ in the sense of manipulating the feelings of a mass audience in a calculated and self-serving way. The cynic manipulated his audience emotionally, bypassing its capacities for reason, inquiry, or intelligent debate.’’ No cynic himself, Mr. Mazella hopes that ‘‘analyzing cynicism is one of the ways that those desirous of change can make the limits of discussion a matter of explicit reflection. . . . Such a process might take us beyond the current deadlocks in discussion . . . and toward more meaningful, substantive forms of change.’’ If only, Mr. Mazella seems to suggest, our political discourse could emulate that of the uppercase Cynic, a disinterested Diogenes who would debate and refute today’s Alexanders and their cynical-insider handlers . As Hemingway wrote, ‘‘Isn’t it pretty to think so?’’ Robert G. Walker SUSAN PATERSON GLOVER. Engendering Legitimacy: Law, Property, and Early Eighteenth-Century Fiction. Lewisburg : Bucknell, 2006. Pp. 231. $49.50. Conjoining complex changes in property law in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to questions of inheritance and succession raised in the wake of the Exclusion Crisis and the Glorious Revolution, Ms. Glover in her impressively researched Engendering Legitimacy argues that male and female prose fiction writers sought to assert new imagined relations between people and property in order to generate new grounds for political and authorial legitimacy in the early years of the century. Recent scholarship—the work of Catherine Gallagher, Catherine Ingras- 72 sia, and Sandra Sherman, to name only a few—has delineated the relationship between the emergence of fictional forms and credit-based, immaterial types of property. Ms. Glover compellingly argues that landed property, like the credit-based forms emphasized in these other studies, persists as a central way of imagining political and individual personality in the fiction of the period and shows how any discussion of the law of property must be inextricably intertwined with questions of legitimacy , inheritance, and, above all, gender. (In this respect, her study might be read alongside Wolfram Schmidgen’s Eighteenth -Century Fiction and the Law of Property, 2002). The Introduction and opening chapter of Engendering Legitimacy offer an illuminating roadmap through the staggering complexity of the laws of landed property, possession, and transfer during the period. Examining changes in the laws of landed property in the context of the Exclusion Crisis and the Glorious Revolution, Ms. Glover focuses in particular on the ways the legitimacy of children and rights over the maternal womb are bound up with the legitimacy of inheritance and succession (property) and the...