Reviews Veronica Kelly and Dorotìiea E. von Mücke, eds. Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. ? + 349pp. US$42.50 (cloth); US$15.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8047-2269-2. Of the twelve essays in this collection, six—including the three most memorable ones— focus more or less on eighteenth-century fiction. Best of the lot is David Wellbery's splendid essay on Werther. Everyone knows that Goethe's novel lives from the rush of feeling; Wellbery employs Lacanian concepts with minute discrimination to analyse the rush. It comes from what he calls the phantasm of the absolute body, a liquid, maternal sexuality, ambiguous and pre-semantic, hence not amenable to referential or ideological decoding. Corresponding to these absorptive emotions is a model ofreading as immersion, as response to voice rather than to meaning; that is how Herder and Goethe read Homer (who climaxes the novel's first half) and, even more, Ossian (who replaces Homer in the second half). In accounting for the novel's gestures Wellbery reflects on his own interpretive procedures, doubling the novel's representation of language with a theory of reading. Critiques of other critics' procedures, of particular readings of Werther, and of general views of its period emerge almost of themselves. The broadly familiar categories respect prior scholarship, while the details are fresh and rich and the synthesis original. Two other distinguished essays are Chris Cullens's spirited account of Mary "Perdita" Robinson's transvestite novel Walsingham, Or the Pupil ofNature (1796), and Helmut Schneider's close reading of the rhetoric of Kleist's "Über das Marionettentheater." CuIlens convincingly ties Robinson's zany mélange of gender-bending and revanchism both to her personal situation as successful but maligned actress and to the dynamics of psychosocial identity construction in the period. While a flailing unicum like this book (Cullens colourfully says that it "pendulates largely," p. 288) does not foster Wellbery's exemplary methodological self-consciousness, Cullens's thematic discussions (of parentage , masquerade, costume, and much else) resonate widely with other works, either in sympathy or in counterpoint. Schneider pointedly refines deconstructive accounts by de Man, Chase, and others, to highlight the mechanics of Kleist's rhetoric and to reveal the work as anti-idealist and constructivist—a fall back into materiality, not forward into revelation. Three other essays feature fictional texts. Elizabeth Heckendom Cook's "The Limping Woman and the Public Sphere" traverses the collection's principal themes as instanced EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 8, Number 1, October 1995 144 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 8:1 in Montesquieu's Lettres persanes: formal embodiment, political embodiment, gendered and disfigured bodies. The parts are strong (as is some material on political economy), but not all the links; talk of "a kind ofcultural paternal death" (p. 25, emphasis added), for instance, makes analogy do too much of the work. Cook's first paragraph illustrates another difficulty that is rather widespread in the volume. It claims that the fictional "scene of writing," with its imagined "traces of a bodily origin," "constructs the writing subject as corporeal" and thus "helps institutionalize a modem understanding of subjectivity as embedded in and inseparable from a discrete body, a notion of individual identity that can be summed up as the body/subject" (p. 23). This progression from materiality to corporeality to subjectivity presumes a stable concept of the body; yet that is exactly what is in question, above all in the postmodem contexts evoked by phrases such as "scene of writing" and "traces." Thomas diPiero argues for a verisimilitude of the unrepresentable in Sade's Justine that defies ideological rationalization. I am not surejust what verisimilitude means here or why he needs the term (which he borrows from Genette), and the negative result, while persuasive, falls short of the specificity of readings ranging in method from, say, Barthes (only some of whose work on Sade is cited) to Brissenden (who is not). Tassie Gwilliam's essay on cosmetics is divided between an Oriental tale, Abdeker: Or the Art ofPreserving Beauty (English translation, 1754), and a play, The New Cosmetic, or The Triumph of Beauty, A Comedy (1790)—two works whose confused ideologies foreground competing processes...