The Age of Projects by Maximillian E. Novak

534 Reviews vention of self supports her analysis of the plays throughout the book. This idea is furtherdeveloped by applying a feminist historicist approach to the texts.Dramat ization of the community ofwomen inwar and post-war settings presents women as creative agents who could utilize the sorrow and grief caused bywar as ameans to reinvent themselves. Instead of trapping their self inside, female characters in the plays began to challenge the traditional norms of society to the extent that they could become communal agencies in strategic problem-solving, the role they played in rebuilding their society. Liddy argues thatdrama was ameans to promote the royal cause, thewriters in sisting that the Interregnum represented an inversion of reality.Performance of the play could engender loyalty to theKing and bolster thedemand for self-fashioning and power implicit in thework ofwriters contributing to that cause. Notions such as that of a female general presented through the character of Lady Victoria in Bell inCampo even suggested the possibility of female military leadership, which, the Lady claimed, could 'bring emotional intelligence to the battlefield and assist them [soldiers] in the combat' (p. 145). This is far from the depiction of female characters such as Desdemona in Shakespeare's plays, which had remained the stereotype ofwomen. The writer's seeming feminist obsessive desire for power is reflected in Lady Victoria's speech when she rates thewomen under her command as soldiers and even refers to them asmen: 'EveryCommand when freed from the Enemies surprizals, shall train theirmen thrice aWeek at least, nay everyday' (Bell inCampo, pt 1,1. 124). Besides the representation of the political issues, the plays discussed in the book refract the transformation in the personal lifeofwomen in their increased ability to shape their own destiny and improved access to public life,with attendance at plays, masks, balls, etc. Florinda in The Rover, for example, who refuses to conform to her father's 'Unjust Command', has an opportunity in the play to speak about her 'soul' in away not seen in thework of earlier playwrights. Liddy's study of women's war drama in seventeenth-century England throws light on other female-authored war literature. This is a rewarding work, written in a clear and understandable style,which makes an original contribution to the subject. Newcastle University Fahimeh Naseri The Age ofProjects. Ed. byMaximillian E. Novak. Toronto: Toronto University Press. 2008. 368 pp. ?55. ISBN 978-0-8020-9873-3. The contributors to this collection of essays on the Tong' eighteenth century under stand the period through the projecting* spirit identified, for instance, inDefoe's Essay upon Projects (1697) and Swift's Academy of Lagado in Gullivers Travels (1726). Defoe and Swift saw projects' in very different lights and the cultural ambivalence over ambitious intellectual novelty iswell conveyed by these sixteen interdisciplinary essays. Interdisciplinary' here is consciously anachronistic, but a list?by no means exhaustive?of modern disciplines covered shows the scope of MLR, 105.2, 2010 535 this book: architecture, drama, economics, education, engineering, ethnography, geology, history, linguistics, literature,mathematics, medicine, musicology, philo sophy, politics, science (broadly denned), sociology, and tourism. By delineating the reorganization of knowledge that saw many of these disciplines become both more fully fledged and more discrete by the turn of the nineteenth century, the book makes an important contribution to eighteenth-century studies. 'To suggest that this collection of essays represents a complete history of this change would be both a distortion and an exaggeration', the editor,Maximillian E. Novak, cautions: 'Butwhat itdoes offer are particular moments in that larger history' (p. 7). Taking this cue, in the space I have in this review I shall comment at length on one essay from each of the book's three sections, and touch more briefly on the others. Part 1, 'Retrieving the Past', includes Margery Kingsley on themes of family and inheritance inClarendon's History of theRebellion (1702-04); Paul Hammond addressing the linguistic layering of theGraeco-Roman and medieval pasts and the Restoration present inDryden's poetry; andWilliam Weber on the canon of 'an cientmusic' that endured before the triumph of 'classical music' in the nineteenth century. Elliott Visconsi's fine essay identifies a 'Trojan moment' when...

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