Refiguring the Coquette: Essays on Culture and Coquetry ed. by Shelley King and Yaël Schlick (review)

242 and appendices, women authenticated their personal travel experiences. Ms. Kinsley usefully examines manuscript travel accounts in the context of current scholarship on scribal culture. Manuscripts were not unprofessional. They were not always private, nor did they imply a marginalization of women’s writing. Rather, manuscript travel texts demonstrate careful attention to textual production and awareness of one’s readers . The second section assesses the ways in which women engaged with the primarily masculine aesthetics of landscape , particularly the picturesque. While women used the framing discourse to give expression to their experiences , they were also likely to break the frame to acquire a more detailed , subjective, and emotional relationship with place. Some women broke the frames of female identity and imagined an alternative sense of self. Part Three analyzes the ways in which eighteenth-century home tour travelers experienced and understood those areas they considered sites of difference , mainly Wales and the Scottish Highlands. Applying theories of modern tourism by Dean McCannell and John Urry, Ms. Kinsley finds that eighteenthcentury travelers, like their later counterparts , sought both Britain’s rural past and its modern progress. By marking some areas of Great Britain as ‘‘other,’’ travelers transformed their domestic journeys into ‘‘foreign’’ travels. Well grounded, Women Writing the Home Tour contributes to travel and tourism, women’s literary culture, and British national identity. Katherine Haldane Grenier The Citadel Refiguring the Coquette: Essays on Culture and Coquetry, ed. Shelley King and Yaël Schlick. Lewisburg: Bucknell, 2008. Pp. 228. $52.50. Refiguring the Coquette ‘‘reveals the coquette’s centrality to an emerging modernity tied to the rise of capitalism.’’ Like recent work on the libertine, the collection complicates a stock character of literary and cultural history and is part of two critical conversations: the recovery of early women’s writing and the study of cultural histories of sexuality and gender. The book is organized in three sections: how the coquette and coquetry have been constructed, why the association with the female body has persisted and how scholars are resisting that association, and how coquetry shaped a discourse of masculinity. This collection builds most significantly on Peter Cryle and Lisa O’Connell’s Libertine Enlightenment: Sex, Liberty, and License in the Eighteenth Century (2004) and Michael McKeon’s ‘‘Historicizing Patriarchy: The Emergence of Gender Difference in England, 1660– 1760’’ (ECS, 1995). Like Cryle and O’Connell, Ms. King and Ms. Schlick challenge stereotypes of their character yet, in contrast, focus on the obvious coquettes and not those ‘‘beyond the familiar figures.’’ Inspired by McKeon, they claim that coquetry parallels the contemporary conversation about sexual difference and the binaries of masculine versus feminine, physiological versus socially constructed. The most compelling arguments of the collection are its challenge to the feminization of the coquette, its claim that coquettes were test sites for emerging theories of sexual difference, and its stance that coquetry is an activity and not a static type. 243 The chapter that most strongly proves these arguments is Theresa Braunschneider ’s, ‘‘The People that Things Make: Coquettes and Consumer Culture in Early Eighteenth-Century British Satire ,’’ which argues clearly and convincingly that coquetry was an exercise in choice, and coquettes a reflection and result of, as well as an influence on, the capitalist market economy and ‘‘consumer revolution’’ of the early eighteenth century. The coquette is an ideal consumer who loves to excess, changes her mind, and values things and services as much as people, particularly men and husbands. With this argument, Ms. Braunschneider wisely avoids the simplified portrait of the coquette as either power player or vulnerable flirt, cultural alien or social intruder, sexual predator or sexually disinterested shopper. She finds that ‘‘the same cultural anxieties underlying the widespread vilification of Mandeville’s idea that ‘private vices’ generate ‘publick benefits’ also help explain the fixation upon the figure of the coquette in this period.’’ Reveling in luxury may be economically good for the nation, but not morally best for the individual, and no one demonstrates England ’s attempt to come to terms with the narcissism and alienation of contemporary consumerism better than the coquette . ‘‘The Masked Coquette: A Paradigm for the Eighteenth-Century Stage’’ also focuses on early period constructions of the...