Collective Understanding, Radicalism, and Literary History, 1645–1742 by Melissa Mowry

Abstract

Reviewed by: Collective Understanding, Radicalism, and Literary History, 1645–1742 by Melissa Mowry Peter Degabriele Melissa Mowry, Collective Understanding, Radicalism, and Literary History, 1645–1742 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2021). Pp. 250; 3 illus. $80.00 cloth. Melissa Mowry's Collective Understanding, Radicalism, and Literary History follows the traces of a non-elite communal practice of hermeneutics and a collectivist politics in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English literary history. The book has five chapters, the first of which functions as an introduction, as well as a short but provocative coda. Throughout, Mowry looks to the Levellers as the positive articulation of a collective hermeneutics that she claims has been buried by the standard narrative of the rise of liberal individualism, and she argues that the political and literary history of the period she examines should be reconceived as a consistent attempt to eradicate this collectivism in favor of a conservative individualism. This is in stark contrast to the conventional narrative of early eighteenth-century political and literary history which argues that an individualist ideology produced a new liberal and anti-absolutist politics. For Mowry, by contrast, the theater of the Restoration and early novels by Defoe worked tirelessly to disavow the possibility of collectivist thought and politics. This refraction of the traditional narrative throws up some surprising and enlightening results. The Tory Aphra Behn and the dissenting Whig Daniel Defoe, for instance, are, in Mowry's account, engaged in the same political project of anti-collectivism rather than existing on opposite sides of a partisan political spectrum. This new lens thus reorients our vision of this period and stands as a profound challenge to conventional ways of understanding the relation of Restoration and early eighteenth-century literature to political ideology. Collective Understanding models a new form of literary criticism that Mowry terms collective hermeneutics. Mowry's reading of the Leveller tradition in the second chapter of the book demonstrates this practice by paying attention to the ways in which texts "articulate relationships rather than statements/principles/ideas, or even identities" (13). This method allows Mowry to recover the contribution of Leveller women to the political praxis of the group, and to demonstrate the way Leveller texts worked by producing affective relationships. These relationships, Mowry argues, are the very basis of political association for the Levellers, a communal political thought that forthrightly challenges the sovereign exceptionalism being developed contemporaneously by theorists such as Thomas Hobbes and Jean Bodin. Mowry argues that instead of a popular sovereignty that would grant "the commonalty the sovereign power of exceptionalism," the Levellers claimed "a more fluid and socially grounded account of authority, stabilized through the affective bonds of collectivity" (57). Mowry deftly recovers this theory of association by her method of reading Leveller writings, a process in which instead of focusing on ideas or individual authorship, she follows traces of collective and social production of texts, from authorship, to printing, to distribution. The claim that Mowry makes through her practice is a significant one: that the kind of liberal, individualist criticism we are accustomed to practice makes it impossible for us to see the very collectivity characteristic of the Leveller movement, and that only a changed critical practice can recover a communitarian and sociable politics. The final three chapters of Collective Understanding focus not so much on tracing the positive development of a collectivist politics, as on finding the remnants of this collectivism in literary and ideological works that are determined [End Page 484] to erase it. Chapter 3 argues that attending to the work of William Davenant and Aphra Behn can demonstrate that "the royalist push to regain cultural authority over the late seventeenth century" enlisted literature to "secure the value and cultural centrality of exceptionalism and singularity" (129). Mowry thus reads the Restoration period as an ideological battle between an alliance of sovereignty and singularity against collectivism. The most interesting account of this battle comes in Mowry's readings of Behn's rewriting of the history of Bacon's rebellion in The Widdow Ranter. The play, for Mowry, is an "indictment of collectivity" (123) in which the "aggregated authority of the first-hand accounts" on which Behn's (and others') knowledge of the...