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1 Autumn 2009 Vol. XLII, No. 1 RECENT ARTICLES* ADDISON See ‘‘Cultures of Whiggism’’: New Essays on English Literature and Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century in Book Reviews, p. 62. BEHN LOWENTHAL, CYNTHIA. ‘‘Two Female Playwrights of the Restoration: Aphra Behn and Susanna Centlivre,’’ A Companion to Restoration Drama, ed. Susan J. Owen. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. Pp. 396–411. Too invested in argument to constitute a sound introduction and too pat rhetorically to offer a contributive argument , Ms. Lowenthal’s essay leaps into one of the larger pitfalls awaiting authors of student-oriented overviews. What will the reader take from this entry ? Positively, serviceable introductions to the careers and critical histories of Behn and Centlivre, smartly focused on the authors’ more widely read plays. But it is difficult to imagine any benefit accruing from the narrow argument about ‘‘the marriage chase,’’ in which Ms. Lowenthal supposes these playwrights *Unsigned reviews are by the editors. notable for employing mannerisms of plot that are in fact intrinsic to comedy. ‘‘Often’’ in their plays, she writes, ‘‘old men act as obstacles to the desires of the young lovers. These ‘blocking characters ’ become the focus of attention as young lovers attempt to circumvent the power these coercive fathers and/or brothers wield.’’ Surely it would cost nothing to acknowledge that Behn’s and Centlivre’s contributions do not include the invention of comedy. Although one ought not expect academic prose to value verve and clarity, it is perhaps reasonable to regret the hardiness of aggressively vacuous constructions like this appositive: ‘‘an anxiety that interrogates and even subverts certain seventeenth-century social truisms .’’ As Bob Dylan once said, ‘‘All right, I’ve had enough; what else can you show me?’’ COLLIER KRISHNAMURTHY, ARUNA. ‘‘‘The Constant Action of our Lab’ring Hands’: Mary Collier’s Demystification of Work and Womanhood in the Early Eighteenth Century,’’ Everyday Revolutions: Eighteenth-Century Women Transform- 2 ing Public and Private, ed. Diane E. Boyd and Marta Kvande. Newark: Delaware , 2008. Pp. 67–93. This essay differentiates between the voice of working-class writers in the later eighteenth century, when the Pitt government ’s attempts to muzzle protest indicate the existence of an articulate and organized group, and the more isolated writers of the earlier period, who did not see themselves as part of a ‘‘working class tradition of letters.’’ Ms. Krishnamurthy compares Duck’s ‘‘The Thresher ’s Labour’’ and Mary Collier’s response , ‘‘The Woman’s Labour’’; these georgic poems of the New Augustan period show how writers with direct experience of labor create a connection between literature and working class identity . Ms. Krishnamurthy’s interesting overview of the history of the georgic from the seventeenth to the early eighteenth centuries, set against the agrarian revolution and the rise of the gentleman farmer, traces the change in women’s work at the same time, when some women began competing with men for vigorous jobs like ploughing. This poetry demonstrates the limitations of the georgic, when it labors to distil beauty and nobility from agricultural sweat and effort. Collier’s and Duck’s poems diverge in their presentation of women. Duck’s women chat idly and do a few small chores while waiting for their men to come home from the fields; Collier’s, on the other hand, are always busy. She critiques the georgic, which has no place for women’s work, and contrasts the woman’s relentless mistress with Duck’s jovial master, who provides his farm laborers with ale at the end of the day. Writing to support working class women in the voice of the middle class, she joins Anne Finch in asserting that women are deliberately denied agency and undereducated to prevent them from competing with men in all fields, including farm labor and writing. This generally persuasive essay weakens at the end by awkwardly introducing Adorno in the last paragraph; the preceding pages more successfully refute Donna Landry’s claim that Collier’s poem is essentially conservative. MARY DAVIES See ‘‘Cultures of Whiggism’’: New Essays on English Literature and Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century in Books Briefly Noted, p. 62. DEFOE BARCHAS, JANINE. ‘‘‘Kits, cats, sacks, and wives’: The Female Multitude on Robinson...