Enlightenment Fiction in England, France, and America by William Donoghue

314 Human (Cambridge 2003). Only one chapter notes Catherine Gallagher’s edition of Behn’s Oroonoko (Bedford/St. Martin’s 1995)—an edition that has been instrumental in helping to place the novel in its global historical context. Readings of eighteenth-century adaptations of the Oroonoko story appear isolated from broader literary developments , including the publication of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative in 1789. With the exception of Ms. Trooboff’s essay, no chapter documents an Afro-British or African-American presence as a contributing factor to the representations described, despite evidence that black authors participated in a wide range of English economic and cultural practices in the eighteenth century (see Vincent Carretta’s anthology of eighteenth-century Black authors, Unchained Voices, Kentucky 1996). Ms. Trooboff’s chapter interestingly speculates that a play no longer extant, The Drama of King Shotaway, written and performed by African-Americans in 1823, may have drawn on the Oroonoko story; she also documents the star status achieved in nineteenth-century England by the African-American actor, Ira Aldridge , who played Oroonoko, among other roles, on the European stage. But the goal of this chapter is to move toward a ‘‘biological, evolutionary model of literary history’’—a view that does not enter into a dialogue with the rather different critical perspective of Black Atlantic studies. The collection’s individual essays provide insights, but together do not advance ‘‘Oroonoko’’ studies. A volume should be larger than the sum of its parts; this one becomes smaller. Alison Conway University of Western Ontario WILLIAM DONOGHUE. Enlightenment Fiction in England, France, and America . Gainesville: Florida, 2002. Pp. 178. $55. One is tempted, on first reading, to complain that Mr. Donoghue’s book has been mistitled. ‘‘Skepticism and the Novel’’ would appear more directly to state the implications of this engaging study, wherein readers follow along as their narrator teases out the intricate, often paradoxical relationship between the ‘‘rise of the novel’’ during the eighteenth century and the concomitant cresting of a wave of materialist skepticism. I use ‘‘narrator’’with reason; the author’s controlling voice is never far from the action in Enlightenment Fiction, and he is doing nothing so much as telling a very good story. This, it turns out, is fully appropriate, for the hero of Mr. Donoghue’s story is story itself. He fully agrees that skepticism and ‘‘the discourse of the novel’’— a somewhat overused phrase here— appear on the stage together for a reason; he disputes, however, the traditional (if not uncontested) reading of realistic fiction as a form of skepticism. In fact, he contends, ‘‘the discourse of the novel,’’ by which he means mimetic realism, represents a response to the skepticism of the age, not its literary analogue. By allowing readers the opportunity to participate , through the suspension of disbelief , in a seemingly undetermined, realistic world simultaneously recognized as predetermined and fictitious, novels provided, and still provide, a mental space in which ‘‘real-world’’ doubt may be, at least for the space of reading, dissipated. The necessary deception at the heart of literary realism, in other words, helps readers to resolve ‘‘epistemological dissonance’’ in a man- 315 ner that, when all belief is in question, carries ethical import. Kant trumps Plato. Mr. Donoghue has organized his project around a series of couplings— Richardson and Pope, Sterne and Laclos, Diderot-as-philosopher and Diderot-asnoveliest , Radcliffe, Godwin, and Goethe , and Charles Brockden Brown and Sade—that are as productive as they are odd. While Pope implicitly and Richardson explicitly ‘‘bestow a surprising degree of legitimacy’’on human artifice for its moral and transformative potential, Sterne cannot, for all his efforts, discover in sensibility ‘‘anything apart from the purely earthbound’’ because it is inseparable from its foundation in ‘‘a materialist philosophy’’; Yorick is famously left at the conclusion of A Sentimental Journey with a handful of the Fille de Chambre’s —the uncertainty tellingly tied, Mr. Donoghue suggests, to a decidedly physical moment of ‘‘feeling.’’ Diderot, we are told, replaces Richardson as his model with Sterne largely because his devotion to philosophical skepticism salted the ground necessary to cultivate realistic fiction; the ‘‘disorderly quality of Diderot ’s novelistic discourse,’’ praised by postmodern critics for ‘‘mirroring...

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