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157 Spring 2011 Vol. XLIII, No. 2 RECENT ARTICLES* ADDISON SYBA, MICHELLE. ‘‘After Design: Joseph Addison Discovers Beauties,’’ SEL, 49 (Summer 2009), 615–635. The first six of Addison’s influential Spectator papers on Paradise Lost address Milton’s overall purpose; the last twelve celebrate book by book the poem’s particular beauties. In Addison’s distinction between ‘‘Design’’ and ‘‘Beauties,’’ the former implies dimensions of authorial intention: a comprehensive plan, a directed strategy of presentation , an intelligible and satisfying moral. ‘‘Beauties,’’ the latter, is more problematic. The difficulty arises because poetic beauties are plural and dispersed and, further, reflect moments of pleasure which vary from one reader to another. Seeking beauties, nonetheless, opens the way toward more engaged and responsive reading. In fact, Addison’s emphasis on collecting poetic beauties both empowered and flattered readers, playing up their native powers of interpretation. Addison observes: ‘‘the Mind, which is always delighted with its own Discoveries, only takes the hint from the Poet, and seems *Unsigned reviews are by the editors. to work out the rest by the strength of her own faculties’’ (Virgil’s Georgics). Interpretive independence implies a relative indifference to original authorial designs or intentions, but Addison ideally aspires to something higher, an intersubjective engagement between author and reader, initiated by hints on one side and unrestrained responsiveness on the other. Such a commerce in hints, Ms. Syba points out, provides another way to get authorial intentions back into critical discourse. Still, the operation of hints differs significantly from a wholehearted embrace of authorial designs; hints are elliptical, local, and fragmentary , more likely to prompt curiosity than to preempt personal interpretation. Addison’s late Discourse on Antient and Modern Learning (1717?, published 1734) demonstrates his awareness of the limitations of a literary responsiveness and criticism based on authorial hints. On one hand, hints are limited and perhaps doubtful, as only so much can ever be known about the mind and intentions of any classic author. On the other, an overreliance on hints can all too easily unleash a critic’s fancifulness. Ms. Syba invites her reader to share 158 her admiration for Addison’s ability to achieve a sane and sensitive balance among sometimes contradictory critical ideas and practices. BEHN CABALLERO ACEITUNO, YOLANDA. ‘‘Anti-Slavery and Sentimentalism in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko,’’ Grove, 13 (2006), 19–28. While Ms. Caballero Aceituno’s abstract indicates that Oroonoko ‘‘contains a clear indictment of slavery,’’ her reading is much subtler. Interweaving concepts related to eighteenth-century sentimentality and physiognomy and drawing on Barbara Benedict’s 1995 SP essay , Ms. Caballero Aceituno explores appearance and gesture, and the way Behn uses these to control reader response toward Oroonoko, Imoinda, and to a lesser extent their fellow slaves. For example, she sees Behn as incorporating ‘‘physiognomical moments’’ that are shaped to draw empathy from the English reader of her time and to ‘‘subvert ’’ the notion that slaves are inferior, since slaves feel and respond as would the English reader. While Ms. Caballero Aceituno’s categories of physiognomy are somewhat slippery, she is good at showing how the gentle and progressive microcosm of Oroonoko’s and Imoinda ’s world in Surinam is overridden by the ‘‘macro-presence’’ of the cruel materialistic world of the colonists. Despite an odd error of conflating the slaves and the Caribs, transferring to the Africans the skin tone and feathered dress of the indigenous peoples, this piece provokes thought and moves the issues of sentimentality back into the late seventeenth century, where earlier critics like Beljame , Miner, Hagstrum, and G. A. Starr had located it in relationship to Oroonoko , but this time with the twist of facial recognition and the reading of gestures. FIGLEROWICZ, MARTA. ‘‘‘Frightful Spectacles of a Mangled King’: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and Narration through Theater,’’ NLH, 39 (June 2008), 321– 334. Behn’s movement from drama to fiction comes at the intersection of crises —personal, professional, and political . Her health was declining, the theaters had merged, and the chaos of Exclusion and Popish plots turned the theatergoers’ attention to a larger theater —more absurd and more terrifying than what the playhouses could afford. Behn had few models for prose fiction as she moved from the...