Adventure: An Eighteenth-Century Idiom: Essays on the Daring and the Bold as a Pre-Modern Medium ed. by Serge Soupel, Kevin L. Cope, and Alexander Pettit (review)

232 ‘‘distinguished’’ this book ‘‘from the Productions of Romance Writers’’; and, finally, conclude their ‘‘due diligence’’ with the reading from Coventry. The other contexts are equally unhelpful . Mr. Potkay narrows his theological material to ‘‘Good Nature,’’ introduces Shaftesbury as an important source for Fielding, and avoids the rich topic of ‘‘Charity.’’ Students will be left to explain to themselves why Adams meets so many ill-natured, uncharitable people. They will not be encouraged to see that in Adams, Fielding comically takes on the problem that Samuel Johnson places at the heart of any reading of Paradise Lost: ‘‘The man and woman who act and suffer are in a state no other man or woman can ever know.’’ As Wolfgang Iser long ago described, the story of Joseph Andrews is motivated by Adams’s innocence, by his never suspecting evil in others. Our laughter at him, Fielding knows, comes at our expense . Henry K. Miller had a long and distinguished career at Princeton, editing and writing the definitive book about Fielding’s Miscellanies, tracing Fielding ’s debts to the Romance tradition , reconstructing that tradition with painstaking comprehensiveness. But in eighteenth-century studies today, as in much of life, the ‘‘new, new thing’’ is what we seek. That Mr. Potkay drops Miller’s work down a scholarly version of Orwell’s ‘‘Memory Hole’’ might not matter if one could find in this edition substantial help for new readers. But they will do better to skip Mr. Potkay’s contexts completely and move on to the text itself, thus avoiding a narrow and misleading account of the Romance tradition, and an equally misleading account of Adams as a madman rather than as Fielding’s remarkable and latter-day version of Adam. Brian McCrea University of Florida Adventure: An Eighteenth-Century Idiom : Essays on the Daring and the Bold as a Pre-Modern Medium, ed. Serge Soupel, Kevin L. Cope, and Alexander Pettit. New York: AMS, 2009. Pp. xxi ⫹ 343. $145. ‘‘Bred to no profession, without relations , friends, or interest, Johnson was an adventurer in the wide world, and had his fortunes to make.’’ Sir John Hawkins in his biography of Johnson (1787) uses a variation of the word adventure in the sense of a future, unknown , and therefore risky endeavor, with overtones of the global journeying of mercantilism that during the eighteenth century became a frequent concomitant of the term. These and many more varied manifestations of adventure are suggested by Messrs. Cope and Pettit in the Forword to these sixteen essays . Fewer than a handful of essays in this disappointing collection will reward the reader. Two essays on Boswell, and one each on Hannah Snell, Thomas Gray (William Roberts’s ‘‘Gray’s Adventures in Scotland and the English Lake District,’’ perhaps the best essay in the collection ), Lord Orford, Bunyan and Cowper, and the Black Caribs of St. Vincent are beyond this journal’s scope. The best essay among the other nine is John A. Baker’s ‘‘Venture and Adventure in Young’s Night Thoughts.’’ Mr. Baker comments insightfully on ‘‘one of the most widely admired poems, both at home and abroad, for many decades . . . which today is probably one of the least read important poems in the English language.’’ This graceful essay defends 233 Young against criticism from George Eliot, who ‘‘writes on Young to write him off,’’ and ties its analysis seamlessly with the subject of the volume: ‘‘Both venture and adventure fix their sights on the future, as the etymology of the words indicates. Young, too, targets the future; the present, like objects or the visible, is demeaned, disqualified, vilified . It is less a question for Young of carpe diem than of carpe noctem or carpe æternitatem, where night is the antechamber of the beyond.’’ Unlike Mr. Baker, several other contributors are defeated by attempts to integrate their essays with the volume’s subject. Two of the three essays on Defoe have this problem. Yannick Deschamps ’ ‘‘Defoe in Scotland (1706– 1707)’’ is a pastiche of other scholars’ works about an interesting episode in Defoe’s life. Modern scholars like Novak and Backscheider are cited, but when Mr. Deschamps quotes from Defoe ’s letters and pamphlets, it is not clear...