Robert G. Walker

Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century by Simon Dickie (review)

from other forms of literature? This shift also does a disservice to the bourgeois women playwrights of the Restoration and early eighteenth century, who had to compete with each other as well as male counterparts for staging. Ms. Cuder-Dominguez is most convincing when she is able to connect contemporary politics with the playwrights’ work, and here she adds to our understanding of specific works by Pix, Manley, Trotter, and Finch. In her own words, ‘‘Gender and genre . . . establish challenging and thought-provoking links . . . that deserve to be teased out further.’’ Frances M. Kavenik University of Wisconsin–Parkside

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)

‘‘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