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Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Volume 1, Number 3, April 1989, pp. 241-243

(Review)

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DOI: 10.1353/ecf.1989.0025

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Reviews

Leopold Damrosch, Jr, ed. Modern Essays on Eighteenth-Century Litera-

ture. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. xi + 488pp.
US$32.50.

This volume is neither one thing nor the other, as Winston Churchill said of the
surname Bossom. It is not exactly a collection of hidden gems, essays buried
in periodicals that ought to be much better known than they are. Half of the
contributions are not essays at all, properly speaking, but are extracts from
books, several of them so well known and so easily available that the utility of
anthologizing them is in doubt: Claude Rawson's Gulliver and the Gentle Reader
(Swift); Ian Donaldson's The World Upside-Down (Gay); Irvin Ehrenpreis's
Acts of Implication (Pope); John Preston's The Created Self (Fielding); John
Richetti's Defoe's Narratives (Defoe). A more successful choice is the excerpt
from John Sitter's Literary Loneliness, a very good book not yet as well known
as it deserves to be.
On the other hand, it is difficult to believe that the articles printed here
represent "the best pieces [Damrosch could find], whether widely quoted or
less familiar." A top twenty without, for example, Pat Rogers, Donald Greene,
James Clifford, Maynard Mack, Margaret Doody, Paul Hunter ... (I have thirty-
three names listed on the inside cover of my copy, all of whom have published
important articles since 1970). John Preston's The Created Self was a very good
book in its day, but it has had its day. Surely William Wimsatt's piece on
the rhetoric of Swift's poems is not the best article available on the subject?
The contribution Damrosch prints by Lawrence Lipking on "Learning to Read
Johnson" seems to me to be Lipking out of form, lacking the wit and speculative
daring that usually characterizes his work. In a sense, if Damrosch asserts that
the articles included here are the best pieces he knows, one cannot contradict
him any more than if he asserts that he has a pain in his leg; but we are entitled
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 1, Number 3, April 1989
242 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION

to know much more than he tells us about where he has been looking and what
criteria he has employed to make the decision. His taciturnity here might provide
ammunition to any reader inclined to see the volume as protective, on the whole,
of a stable canon and an unreflective critical consensus. And there is, I think,
a laxity about this book as a publishing venture that may be indicative of a
certain smugness. Aside from its inadequate editorial introduction, it contains
no information about contributors, and its scholarly credentials are undermined
by the absence of an index. Misprints are epidemic: the one that punctures
Marshall Brown's quotation from Young's Night Thoughts on p. 450 is more
amusing, perhaps, to British than American readers:
Reason pursu'd is Faith; and, unpursu'd
Where Poof [sic] invites, 'tis Reason, then no more.

On the whole, the volume offers us a canonical spread both of authors covered
and critics covering. Contributions on Swift (three), Pope (two), Gay, Defoe
(two), Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Steme, Johnson, Boswell, mid-century
poetry (two), and Burney give the collection its "set author" identity, and the
focus is on the engagement between such set authors and major critics of the
American establishment. For another obvious aspect of the volume's sociology,
alarming to those of us working on this side of the fish-pond, is that only two
contributors live in Britain; Howard Erskine-Hill, whose essay on Pope's life
and work is the most explicitly political contribution in the book, and Gillian
Beer.
I do not mean to imply that this is a collection of turkeys. It is not. There is
some excellent material here. But the comparison between this volume and the
recent Methuen collection The New Eighteenth Century, edited by Felicity Nuss-
baum and Laura Brown, is instructive. Their volume has a new-historicist bias,
demonstrating a "theoretically informed interdisciplinarity" that takes on board
feminist, Marxist, psychoanalytical, and cultural-political approaches. Even if
one is inclined to dismiss this as modish nonsense, one is forced to admit that
it has produced a more conscientious publication with a clearer, and stated, ra-
tionale. Comparatively few of the essays in the Damrosch collection are at all
self-conscious about their own critical procedures or are interested in contribut-
ing to recent debates about the object of literary study. Those that are are among
the best, suggesting a realm of lost opportunity, the Bermuda triangle between
Damrosch's "modem" eighteenth century and Nussbaum and Brown's "new"
eighteenth century. Michael McKeon's essay on "Rethinking the Rise of the
Novel" has now been superseded by his book The Origins of the English Novel,
but the essay printed here still has value as an abbreviated account of the over-
lapping processes of historical and generic dialectic that produced the novel as
a dominant cultural form. John Richetti's application of close reading informed
by narratology to Robinson Crusoe produces a scrupulous and subtle reading—
more interesting, I fear, than the novel itself. It is unfortunate that G.A Starr's
 REVIEWS 243

essay on "Defoe's Prose Style" is printed after this because Richetti makes
much of it look simplistic. Less successful, despite the general thrust of my ar-
gument, is the extract from a book billed on publication in 1981 as "the first
deconstructionist interpretation of a major eighteenth-century book," William C.
Dowling's Language and Logos in Boswell's "Life of Johnson." Dowling sets
up as a problem "the tension between the various idealized versions of John-
son that dominate the foreground of the biographical story and the darker and
more disturbing Johnson we glimpse in its gloomy background." Nothing much
new in that, but soon Dowling is speaking in deconstructionist cant: "the notion
of an ideal or abstract center ... is something equally posited by the opposing no-
tions of presence and absence; in a manner of speaking they converge on it. For
to say that there is a vacuum at the center of the Life is to say that the center
exists after all." Deconstruction has no monopoly, however, on the uninforma-
tive: I am no more edified by Richard A. Lanham's comment on Sterne's Uncle
Toby, that "he is not a great figure of humor because he can feel, but he can
feel because he is a great figure of humor."
The three articles that are propelled by feminist modes of inquiry are espe-
cially good. Patricia Meyer Spacks expresses Fanny Burney's life's purpose and
principle of artistic structure as the need "to defend the freedom of the self
by asserting fear of wrongdoing and commitment to virtue": and, Houdini-like,
manages to write interestingly on a writer with that depressing mission. Gillian
Beer's essay on "the Heroic Epistle, Pope, and Women's Gothic" is joint win-
ner of the Hammond prize for the best essay in the volume. She shares with Leo
Braudy, whose essay "Penetration and Impenetrability in Clarissa" is also on an
aspect of self-definition through literature in the period, and both essays are cen-
tral in that they could not be overlooked by anyone writing on the fields to which
they are germane. John Traugott's essay on A Tale of a Tub (for which, inciden-
tally, incorrect bibliographical reference is given: it was first published in 1971
in Swift, ed. CJ. Rawson, Sphere Books, London), is still formidably intelli-
gent if rather self-advertisingly so; and Michael Rosenblum's piece "Smollett
and the Old Conventions" is modestly illuminating in detecting the persistence
of undigested romance conventions in Smollett, even if he concedes too little to
Humphry Clinker as a satisfactory blending of satire and romance.
A disappointing collection, then, since the juxtaposition of items does not
transcend the merits of each individual article.

Brean Hammond
University of Liverpool