Jonathan Swifts Autonekrolog—Die Verse auf den Tod von Dr. Swift, D.S.P.D.: Übersetzung—Kommentar—Interpretation (“Jonathan Swift’s Autonecrology. Verses on the Death of Dr Swift, D.S.P.D. Translation — Commentary — Interpretation”) by Wilhelm Füger (review)

211 the extraordinary, even the monstrous. Throughout Mr. Frail’s study, Prévost emerges as a ‘‘mercurial’’ outsider to the mainstream Enlightenment. The book is divided into chapters on Richardson and Prévost. Aside from one essay on the abbé’s translation of Grandison , which successfully defends him from the charge of ill-considered pruning , the two authors are mostly treated separately. Their juxtaposition does throw up interesting parallels, but it is left to the reader to make the connections . There is little attempt, for example , to follow up the claim that their fiction ‘‘is linked to the representation of reality in deeper and more penetrating ways than any other authors from the early part of the eighteenth century.’’ Neither is the Preface’s assertion that ‘‘what links Richardson and Prévost together more than anything else is the way they practiced alchemy with language and became goldsmiths of the word’’ substantiated by any kind of comparative linguistic, or stylistic, analysis . Instead each chapter reads like a self-contained conference paper (as the Acknowledgements reveal, some of them initially were). This has its strengths; each is witty and entertaining, and would go down well when delivered orally. The chapter on ‘‘Pamela in the Chat-Room,’’ for example, takes some humorous swipes at the current vogue for online assessment methods, and discusses the ‘‘sexual nuances in the language of computers.’’ Mr. Frail suggests that ‘‘when Mr. B. opens his ‘toolbox,’ Pamela needs to call the Help Center,’’ and that she ‘‘runs the risk of being infected by Mr. B.’s ‘worm.’’’ At such idiosyncratic (if not odd) moments Mr. Frail seems to be haunted by the abbé’s mercurial spirit. Joe Bray University of Sheffield WILHELM FÜGER. Jonathan Swifts Autonekrolog —Die Verse auf den Tod von Dr. Swift, D.S.P.D.: Übersetzung— Kommentar—Interpretation (‘‘Jonathan Swift’s Autonecrology. Verses on the Death of Dr Swift, D.S.P.D. Translation — Commentary — Interpretation’’). Hamburg: Verlag Dr. Kovac, 2006. Pp. 109. ⫽ C 56. To make Swift’s Verses more easily accessible to a German-speaking public, this monograph presents the poem bilingually . While the English text mainly follows Pat Rogers’s modern-spelling version of 1983, the new German translation (made by Mr. Füger) represents a compromise between the Scylla of optimal form and the Charybdis of optimal semantic equivalence, with the heroic couplet taking the place of the octosyllabic original. Swift’s own footnotes in Faulkner’s 1739 edition have German translations, as do quotations from secondary literature. There is a selective Bibliography. Mr. Füger presents the complicated publication history of the text, indispensable topical information, and different interpretative approaches. Particularly illuminating are his reflections on the dissociation of Swift’s Verses from adjoining genres such as elegy, autobiography , and epitaph. Mr. Füger’s history of the poem’s reception chronicles the vicissitudes of textual criticism; he rightly warns against applying to Swift’s complex self-obituary such modish categories as the disintegration of identity. An index would have been useful. The 212 volume’s disobliging price may be forbidding . Heinz-Joachim Müllenbrock University of Göttingen PATRICIA MEYER SPACKS. Novel Beginnings : Experiments in EighteenthCentury English Fiction. New Haven and London: Yale, 2006. Pp. ix ⫹ 309. $33. This wide-ranging yet beautifully focused survey of the novel explores its varieties without assuming realism, or indeed any other quality, to be its generic goal. Ms. Spacks acknowledges categorization as a necessary artifice for the critic, and the loose, interconnected categories she employs—novels of adventure , development, consciousness, sentiment, manners, gothicism, and politics —allow for a roughly chronological progression through the century’s fiction without ever becoming restrictive. The emphasis throughout is on unusual juxtapositions of novels, and on a thorough integration of the famous with the less known, and of the works of male and female writers. The scope and swift pace leave little room for close attention to verbal texture or tone, but her telling details still convey the novels’ life. Plot remains (as it is in her Desire and Truth) one of Ms. Spacks’s central concerns, and many summaries here that might be tedious in other hands are lively. Discussing differences of narrative...