Marvelous Contradictions

Abstract

Marvelous Contradictions Manushag N. Powell (bio) Sarah Tindal Kareem Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Reinvention of Wonder new york: oxford university press, 2014 xiv + 278 pages; isbn: 9780199689101 Christopher F. Loar Political Magic: British Fictions of Savagery and Sovereignty 1650–1750 new york: fordham university press, 2014 xi + 326 pages; isbn: 9780823256914 Jason H. Pearl Utopian Geographies and the Early English Novel richmond: university of virginia press, 2014 viii + 203 pages; isbn: 9780813936239 a trio of recent monographs purport to show not only that the eighteenth-century advent of realism in fiction still had room for magic and wonder, but also that some powerful fantasies may have transformed, and been transformed by, Enlightenment fiction. These are no whimsical treatments of fancy: the byword in all of these texts is ambivalence. For Christopher F. Loar’s Political Magic: British Fictions of Savagery and Sovereignty, 1650–1750, the “First Gunshot Topos,” in which rebels or savages are subdued less by deadly technological inferiority itself than by the awful terror it inspires, acts as the recurring symbol of a deep concern about tactics used to contain the masses in favor of political stability. In Loar’s analysis of a wide variety of curious fictions, that which is magical is also potentially Satanic. Jason H. Pearl’s Utopian Geographies and the Early English Novel reads a series of well-known early-period travel fictions to show how skeptical thinking (“geographical disenchantment”) linked utopias to a darker side of wonder. Pearl argues that when fiction [End Page 563] writing rejects the utopias of exotic locales as doomed to failure, an interior ideal state—a utopia of the self—becomes possible. And Sarah Tindal Kareem’s ambitious Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Reinvention of Wonder bridges the natural wonders of the seventeenth century and poetic wonders of the nineteenth to argue that the novel form reinvents a particular wonder just for the eighteenth-century reader by employing narrative techniques that allow the audience to enjoy both belief and disbelief simultaneously: realism and defamiliarization work hand-in-hand and cross-catalyze. What this triad of titles offers is not another tiresome refutation of the oft-refuted claims that magic left English writing between the Renaissance and the Romantics; rather they show how happily dark and discordant Enlightenment magic could be. While each of these titles is distinct, and, in its own way, very pleasantly unconventional, they hold in common an interest in paradoxical thinking and an embrace of experimental prose fictions alongside more canonical entries. In this sense they fit well with the period they have chosen, the era in which scientific and magical thinking serenely co-existed: in which the Royal Society was founded (1660) but the learned astrologer John Partridge still published popular yearly almanacs of Ptolemaic predictions from 1681–1709; in which Herman Moll began producing (in 1710) beautiful pocket-sized globes showing the path of Dampier’s famous voyages, yet several credulous medicos could believe that Mary Toft gave birth to rabbits in 1726; and in which, as everyone likes to mention to wow students, it seemed wise to outlaw witchcraft (until 1735). If witchcraft was verboten, though, this did not extend to all performances meant to summon awe in the onlooker, and street magic remained popular throughout the century. A 1721 pamphlet advertising the abilities of a “Famous Artist,” John Emanuel Schoitz, offers an interesting tie from Kareem’s work to Loar’s. The Wonder of all the Wonders that Ever the World Wonder’d at (By the Author of The Art of Punning, Benefit of Farting, &c.) is little more than a list of conjuror’s tricks, most of which flirt with doing shocking violence to the audience.1 The first two, following Loar’s chief motif, are specifically about gunpowder: “He heats a Bar of Iron red-hot and thrusts it into a Barrel of Gunpowder . . . and yet it shall not take fire. He lets any Gentleman charge a Blunderbuss with the same Gunpowder, and twelve Leaden-Bullets; which Blunderbuss the said Artist discharges full in the Face . . . without the least Hurt” (3–4). While such advertisements for wonder workers were common, this one is actually a satire by Jonathan...