The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn ed. by Derek Hughes and Janet Todd (review)

58 dictory positions, for which they fault him rather than themselves. Maximillian E. Novak shows that Defoe’s expectations of himself as a journalist were different from ours. ‘‘He was there to argue about the events of his time—to satirize the wrong view and to assure readers that his interpretation of events was the proper one,’’ and his interpretation was subject to change. He believed not in a party or ideology, but a set of ideas—in progress, toleration, government by the people through Parliament —and he was ‘‘willing to do anything to see them come about,’’ which sometimes meant taking a hand in publications that were ‘‘on the wrong side of these issues.’’ He set the limits and made the rules of political debates—sometimes, for both sides at once. The other fine essays in this book generally support the view that to ‘‘know’’ Defoe in one sense is to miss him in several others. Srinivas Aravamudan examines Defoe’s economic thought, which he describes as ‘‘doctrinally incoherent’’—not because Defoe was a bad economist, but because his ‘‘flexible globalism imports the useful theological technique of casuistry, or arguing for context-driven ethical and moral principles, to the economic realm.’’ Defoe was already thinking globally while working locally, a practice that informs his adventure fiction. Hal Gladfelter argues that Defoe ‘‘had no overarching or unifying theory of crime,’’ but rather that his fictions expose ‘‘the delinquency at the heart of the modern individualist subject.’’ All forms of individualist self-assertion are transgressive for Defoe, but some are worse than others. Diedre Shauna Lynch examines the role of money and its relation to character in Defoe’s fiction; Pat Rogers considers Defoe’s Tour as a moment in the construction of British national identity; Cynthia Wall surveys Defoe’s London, which she calls ‘‘a disorderly world, a city unsafe in any moment,’’ which Defoe described in all its contradictory complexity; and Michael Seidel focuses on the island experience in Robinson Crusoe. John McVeagh, writing on Defoe as satirist, brings the point of Defoean indeterminacy home when he remarks that in the novel Defoe finally discovered ‘‘the ironist’s heaven—the kind of text in which no reader could finally pin the author down.’’ In short, given Defoe’s prolixity, disguises, covert intentions, and narrative innovations , no author better merits a Cambridge Companion than he. There is some unavoidable overlap here, but by judiciously choosing among the offerings, instructors in Defoe Studies can assist their students to understand what it is about Defoe that is impossible to pin down. The essays are listed in Contents, p. 129. Geoffrey Sill Rutgers University The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn, ed. Derek Hughes and Janet Todd. Cambridge : Cambridge, 2004. Pp. xxii ⫹ 248. £50. First, Mary Ann O’Donnell offers a chronology of Behn’s life and publications up to 1718, as well as a documentary record of her parentage, visit to Surinam, spying mission, and later career. Mr. Hughes recounts how she became the first Englishwoman to earn her living as a writer, the chief professional dramatist of her time 59 after Dryden and Shadwell, with eighteen new plays performed between 1670 and 1689 (Dryden had fourteen). Indeed half of the eight new comedies staged in the season of 1681–1682 were hers. As Ms. Todd and Mr. Hughes explain, she started off in the 1660s with tragicomedies featuring hero-kings whose ‘‘appetite for conquest ’’ was chiefly directed at women and whose lust produced ‘‘impasses’’ that feminine cunning resolved. She then won fame for her comedies, but returned to tragicomedy at the end of her career in The Widdow Ranter (1689), set in a colonial Virginia where the vacuum of authority and corrupt laws generate rebellion. According to Susan Staves, Behn critiqued the commodification of women in her day, especially with regard to marriage, and showed little sympathy for the dominant religious ideology of the Church of England. Behn, for Robert Markley, parodied the ‘‘merchandizing of sexual pleasure’’ in her comedies and created heroines who hazarded all, yet ingeniously avoided seduction and disgrace. Helen Burke finds in Behn’s The Rover (1677) a ‘‘carnivalesque inversion of the cavalier myth,’’ where young virgins have...