<i>Mind, Body, Motion, Matter: Eighteenth-Century British and French Literary Perspectives</i> . Edited by M <scp>ary</scp> H <scp>elen</scp> M <scp>c</scp> M <scp>urran</scp> and A <scp>lison</scp> C <scp>onway</scp> <i>Mind, Body, Motion, Matter: Eighteenth-Century British and French Literary Perspectives</i> . Edited by McMurranMary Helen and ConwayAlison. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. vi + 293 pp., ill.

This volume represents one of the most recent interventions to the broad debate on cross-Channel exchanges. It is edited by scholars who have contributed greatly to this field, and the majority of its contributors are based in English departments. The collection, as a result, leans more towards coverage of English Enlightenment thinkers than of their French counterparts. Throughout, the collective lens is turned to eighteenth-century literature and philosophy, and, as co-editor Mary Helen McMurran points out in her single-authored Introduction, although these topics ‘would appear to invite interdisciplinary analysis’, each chapter is ‘premised instead on the eighteenth century’s pre-disciplinarity’ (p. 4). The collection is divided into two parts: ‘Pre-reflective Experience’, and ‘Materialisms’. In the former, essays by Ruth Mack and Jonathan Kramnick discuss Hogarth and Hobbes, David Alvarez reads Locke after Shaftesbury, and McMurran focuses on Joseph-François Lafitau’s Mœurs des sauvages (1724). In Part Two, the essays engage explicitly with literary texts, providing close readings of engagement with philosophical materialism. Here, Sara Landreth reads Defoe’s Consolidator and his Vision of the Angelick World, and Sarah Ellenzweig provides a fresh reading of Clarissa, using materialism’s teachings on the appetites to help us to understand the heroine — and her seducer. Kate E. Tunstall reads Sterne’s Tristram Shandy alongside Diderot’s Le Rêve de d’Alembert, pointing out that ‘the early modern materialist imaginary is not only stocked with clocks and machines, but also teeming with bugs’ (p. 219). Joanna Stalnaker provides a close reading of Diderot’s Éléments de physiologie, in which she explores Diderot’s philosophic life as one that — in the opinion of the philosophe — ‘tracked deep memory through its encyclopedic attempts to understand nature’ and was also ‘one that saw its own efforts as subject to the eventual annihilation of the self’ (p. 249). Finally, Vivasvan Soni’s Conclusion is given a privileged position. It is a fine essay with which to close this ambitious and thought-provoking study. The range of material explored here is impressive; for this reason, the collection may have benefited from a bibliography. On a related matter, I was frequently frustrated by not having dates of first publication provided in the main body of the essays — few scholars will be conversant with all the primary material in a volume of this broad scope. But these are quibbles. This collection will be of interest and value to all those interested in natural philosophy, materialism, the history of science, and cognitive humanities.

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