Shandean, vol. 19, ed. by Peter de Voogd (review)

226 London in the time of the plague, Colonel Jack looked for gentility in all the wrong places, and Captain Bob dared not explain the basis of his friendship for William the Quaker, but none of these dilemmas was thought to be related to their masculinity. Mr. Gregg now shows us that a unifying theme of much of Defoe’s writing had to do with the nature of manliness, a problem made especially urgent by the emergence of a culture in which such traditionally (or stereotypically) feminine practices as the pursuit of civic and religious virtue, the consumption of luxury goods, and a dependence on credit and trade increasingly defined what it was to be a man. Defoe, like the Earl of Shaftesbury and other contemporaries, assumed that masculinity was normative and natural, and defined femininity (and feminized men, like fops) as the contradiction to manliness. Thus physical vigor, personal courage, rationality, godliness, selfcontrol , and an ethic of civic utility comprised manliness, and their contraries were feminine. But none of the males in Defoe’s writings exhibited all of these qualities all of the time; rather, his men are often anxious that they are falling away into unmanly actions, or becoming ‘‘contrary men.’’ Crusoe is generally successful in The Strange Surprizing Adventures at maintaining his masculinity, but in the Farther Adventures he is by turns weak, fearful, irrational , blasphemous, unstable, and murderous . H. F. shows less charity than Robert the Waterman and less courage than the three men from Stepney. Singleton ’s piratical past and his secretive affection for William raise questions about his civic virtue, and Jack’s delusion of his gentility disables him as a man. Mr. Gregg also draws on Defoe’s nonfiction, especially The Compleat English Gentleman and The Complete English Tradesman, to show that these contrarieties were not mere fictional devices , but abiding concerns throughout Defoe’s career. Defoe transformed notions of masculinity into ‘‘something more complicated than the dominant (and somewhat stereotypical) ideals of the time,’’ but what this ‘‘something’’ is Mr. Gregg does not say. The study does not look forward to notions of masculinity explored by Defoe’s literary heirs, such as Richardson and the sentimental novelists who created the ‘‘man of feeling’’ in the second half of the century. Instead, Mr. Gregg emphasizes the ‘‘insistent and rigorous streak of conservative moral didacticism in Defoe’s work,’’ as if Defoe’s quest for manliness ended in a tangle of unresolved contradictions and issueless failures. Mr. Gregg’s interesting line of inquiry deserves further study and development. Geoffrey Sill Rutgers University Shandean, ed. Peter de Voogd. Vol. 19. The Laurence Sterne Trust, 2008. Pp. 157. £24. Two essays place Sterne in the Latitudinarian mainstream of eighteenthcentury Anglicanism: Tim Parnell’s ‘‘Laurence Sterne and the Problem of Belief (II),’’ the second half of a twopart essay first published in Shandean, 17, and Geoff Newton’s ‘‘Laurence Sterne and his Church.’’ The first part of Mr. Parnell’s essay sifted the ‘‘scant biographical archive’’ for insight into Sterne’s religious beliefs; this part focuses on ‘‘the textual evidence,’’ meaning Sterne’s published writings. Against critics such as Paul Goring, Judith Hawley , and Ian Campbell Ross, who have 227 questioned Sterne’s orthodoxy, Mr. Parnell claims the ‘‘acid test’’ for charges must be the sermons themselves, not the contemporary—decidedly mixed, thus inconclusive—responses to Sterne. But it is in his contextualization of these controversies that the essay shines. Again and again, Mr. Parnell demonstrates how ‘‘contemporary criticisms of the Sermons of Mr. Yorick belong to debates that took place within the Anglican and wider Protestant community, and cannot therefore be read as proof of Sterne’s heterodoxy.’’ While Sterne’s fiction could run ‘‘into more risky territory ,’’ Mr. Parnell warns against making too neat a distinction between ‘‘the professional pieties of the reverend and the putative scepticism of the romancer ,’’ suggesting instead that ‘‘the common ground between fiction and sermons reminds us of the rootedness of many of his concerns in Anglican thought.’’ A secondary target in Mr. Parnell ’s essay—and it is a distant second —is Melvyn New, who, on the other end of the spectrum, ‘‘extrapolate[s] a more pious image of...