Novel Definitions: An Anthology of Commentary on the Novel, 1688–1815 ed. by Cheryl L. Nixon (review)

234 micturition that fails because of a tendency to view Gulliver as a novelistic character (‘‘he falls victim to his own defective memory. . . . Memory returns too late and the narrator is no longer reliable —and never will be again’’). Norbert Col (‘‘Rewriting History in Gulliver ’s Travels’’) deals head-on with Gulliver as ‘‘a quasi-inconsistent puppet,’’ and concludes provocatively that Gulliver ’s ‘‘is a linear, cumulative, rather than a cyclical history. Yet both are present. . . . The coexistence of these two incompatible outlooks on history points to the clumsy articulation of the historian and the moralist in Swift.’’ Andrew Varney contributes a slight but competent biographical and textual study with ‘‘Fielding’s Last Adventure: The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon.’’ In ‘‘The Adventure of Sense(s) in Richardson ’s Clarissa,’’ Hélène Dachez’s close textual readings provide an occasional insight, but more often something trite (Freudian imagery) or incredibly wrongheaded (‘‘what [Clarissa] regrets is not the rape itself but the absence of shared pleasure’’). Ms. Dachez undercuts a potentially interesting point— Richardson’s ‘‘mimetic writing’’—with spotty research. She ties Pamela’s remark (‘‘how my heart went pit-a-pat’’) to Lovelace’s (‘‘I could even distinguish her dear heart flutter, flutter, flutter, against mine’’). But the commonplace of the heart’s pit-a-patting appears in Beaumont and Fletcher, Nathaniel Lee, Dryden, and the Spectator, among many others. Joseph Andrews, Fielding’s parody of Pamela, contains it, but there is no need to cite Pamela at all, since the expression appears in Clarissa itself, followed by ‘‘to speak in the female dialect .’’ Victoria Bridges Moussaron (‘‘The Adventure of a ‘Sublime Subject’: The Shipwreck [1762] by William Falconer ’’) takes all the fun out of a shipwreck when she explains that from the view of the poet, who was subsequently to die in a shipwreck, ‘‘it was not a matter of adventure. . . . The adventure thereby becomes rather more that of his readers .’’ Two things impede Ms. Moussaron ’s attempts to provide us with an insightful close reading of the midcentury poem: the first, familiar to us by now, is the awkward imposition of the volume’s topic and the second is a failure to reproduce accurately the poem’s text. Eschewing the recent scholarly edition of Falconer (Mellen, 2003), she quotes from an 1811 London ‘‘reprint’’ of the 1762 edition. Suspecting she was silently italicizing for emphasis, I checked an on-line version of what I assume is her text and confirmed my suspicion . Additionally, she inconsistently omits italics and capitalization and drops words without ellipses. When she relates that the poem’s hero, Palemon, ‘‘dies in the fateful shipwreck and those to whom the poet tells the story die upon hearing it, as though the affect produced by the recitation were fatal,’’ the reader of this collection can empathize . Robert G. Walker St. Petersburg, FL Novel Definitions: An Anthology of Commentary on the Novel, 1688–1815, ed. Cheryl L. Nixon. Buffalo: Broadview , 2009. Pp. 435. $32.95. Novel Definitions is a perfect book. Ms. Nixon’s anthology is organized so that each of the more than one hundred selections is not only illuminating on its own, but cumulatively adds up to a detailed history of commentary on the novel from its earliest days to 1815. At 235 that date, the novel as a literary construct seemed to be so established a part of British culture that it was no longer suspect and justification no longer required . Unlike most anthologies, this one invites reading through rather than selecting items of individual interest to specific readers. This is not to say that any particular item cannot be easily culled, but only that Ms. Nixon has arranged her offerings so well that one is tempted to read them in the order she has provided . When first agreeing to undertake this review, I thought her decision to provide excerpts (for the most part) would result in an unsatisfying, arbitrary set of readings that might seem more a reflection of her taste than the documents ’ importance. Her skillful presentation precludes this problem: each piece is preceded by useful contexts for the work, as well as cogent summaries of what the dedication, preface...