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COPYRIGHT 2002 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
By Andrew Varney. London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. xii + 238 pages.
Andrew Varney, generally speaking, is a good writer, and this is a thoughtful book. As the title suggests, the book winds its way through a number of topics, texts, and writers. Eighteenth-Century Writers in Their World aims to connect literary texts from the first half of the eighteenth century to the cultural contexts from which they issued, such as science, discussions of finance and credit, travel narratives, and discourses of gender, sex, love, and marriage. It treats major literary monuments like The Rape of the Lock (1717) and Tom Jones (1749) as well as a number of less frequently discussed works and authors such as Roderick Random (1748) and The Secret History of Queen Zarah (1705) and Penelope Aubin and Bernard MandeviUe. Throughout, the text bespeaks Varney's skills as a close reader and his wide knowledge of eighteenth-century British culture and society; it also features a judicious, if highly selective, use of criticism. Some readers will benefit greatly from this text, but specialized readers--the eighteenth-century scholar or the student of the novel who is conversant with the lively, ongoing debate over the origins of the novel in English--will find less here than they might hope for. Such readers may well miss two particular features of a really compelling study: first, a reasonably well-theorized method for examining the link between literature and the world at large, and, second, an argument tying the various insights offered by the author into a reasonably coherent whole. Thus, while this book is intelligent and...
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