Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders. A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism by Paul Baines (review)

208 part with the work of important literary critics such as Erin Mackie, Ann Dean, and Tony Pollock, who have explored the fiction of the public in the eighteenth century— and, in the process, driven a stake through the heart of Habermas’s fanciful account of the ‘‘public sphere’’—would have strengthened this study. For many readers of the Scriblerian, Representation and Misrepresentation is perhaps best read in implicit dialogue with these works. Mr. Knights remains a better interdisciplinary historian than a literary critic; his case studies offer valuable insights into the workings of Stuart elections and partisan wrangling in a period that witnessed intensifying struggles between radically different conceptions of who deserved to speak for the public and who deserved to constitute the voting public. The election history in Cheshire in the late seventeenth century , for example, shows how the interactions between print and electioneering helped both to redefine and destabilize key political concepts while fostering an emerging sense that an identifiable public existed that could express its ‘‘will’’ for the good of the nation. As a legitimizing arbiter of partisan debate, the public could be both abused and exalted, and its ‘‘interest’’ sought as a normative standard against which sedition and self-interest could be identified and condemned. At its best, Representation and Misrepresentation demonstrates how the abstraction of the public will, this ‘‘collective fiction,’’ was pieced together out of specific instances of local debate and periodical controversy to become a crucial site of contestation among competing interests and affiliations: both the ultimate signifier for eighteenth-century republicanism and a partisan, even cynical, rhetorical gesture toward disinterested argument and patriotic legitimacy. This long and detailed study is well worth reading. Robert Markley University of Illinois BOOKS BRIEFLY NOTED* PAUL BAINES. Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders. A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism. Houndmills , UK, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. $20.95 (paper). It once was possible to raise an ironic smile in academic circles with a remark about the ‘‘Defoe industry,’’ but the abundance of Defoe criticism since Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957) has taken the humor out of the joke. Several talented scholars, notably Novak, Backscheider , Richetti, Hunter, Starr, and Pat *Unsigned reviews are by the editors. Rogers, have devoted substantial portions of their academic careers to mapping the life of Defoe and the formal strains of his writings, while others have contributed monographs. Owens and Furbank have reduced the size of the Defoe canon and stimulated the intertextual study of his work through their Pickering Masters edition, while a team led by Novak has meticulously prepared the initial volumes of the Stoke Newington critical edition. A new Defoe Society holds out the promise of a congeniality that has sometimes been wanting in Defoe studies. This reader’s guide to the criticism of Defoe’s two most fa- 209 mous novels is a welcome introduction to all this activity. After a brief life of Defoe and short publication history of Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, Mr. Baines devotes a chapter to the nineteenth- and earlytwentieth -century reception of Defoe, which ranged from Sir Leslie Stephen’s dry verdict, ‘‘not very interesting,’’ to his daughter Virginia Woolf’s recognition that Moll ‘‘does give us a slight shock—not the jolt of disillusionment, but the thrill that proceeds from a living being.’’ Early criticism focused on the experience of reading Defoe—the moral distaste or embarrassment of class felt by some readers, and the revelation experienced by others at seeing things as they are. Another chapter examines the ‘‘rise of the novel’’ phenomenon, culminating (rather than beginning) with Watt’s 1957 study, which established Robinson Crusoe as the starting point of ‘‘the novel’’ as a ‘‘clear formal category .’’ Mr. Baines summarizes the main points of Watt’s historical and formal theory of the novel, the critiques made of it, and Watt’s responses to them. Though now largely a sounding board against which younger critics test their voices, Watt receives more index entries here than any other single critic. Chapters titled ‘‘The Art of Fiction’’ and ‘‘Traditions and Innovations’’ consider criticism written between 1960 and 1985. Defoe’s standing as an ‘‘artist ’’ of the...