968 Reviews Miller himself asks: 'How seriously did Hume regard his deathbed project?' (p. 63); he concedes that 'Marat did not have a deathbed project but his reason for admitting Corday can be called one' (p. 123); and he provides the evidence that Johnson did not think deathbed scenes should be taken seriously. If these undermine the seriousness of his own project, they also point to a certain lack of attentiveness to the propriety of misusing individuals' deaths as a way of organizing an essay on Enlightenment think? ing. Charlotte Corday, whose act made Chapter 4 possible, was herself guillotined, unrepentant, four days after stabbing Marat. Miller, interested in Marat's 'project', loses sight of his assassin, who also had a 'project' forwhich she was prepared to die. Some things, even aftermore than two hundred years, should not be taken frivolously. University of Northumbria at Newcastle Allan Ingram Johnson Re-Visioned: Looking Before and After. Ed. by Philip Smallwood. (Bucknell Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture) Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell University Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2001. 179 pp. ?3?ISBN 0-8387-5494-5. In the detail fromJames Barry's The Progress ofHuman Knowledge and Culture (1783) reproduced somewhat dimly in the text of this book and rather more brightly on the dust jacket, Johnson peers anxiously from the background, shaded by two imposing aristocratic women. It is, as Jaclyn Geller points out (p. 93), an unusual perspective on Johnson, and this book seeks to restore a number of such perspectives, or 'vi? sions', by recovering a sense of location and engagement in Johnson's work. Greg Clingham opens the volume with a roll-call of recent criticism on Johnson and an analysis ofthe ways in which Johnson's various 'resistances' to our critical paradigms might be actively cultivated as the starting point for a new scholarship. His themes are most closely picked up in the two last and longest essays in the volume. Philip Smallwood exposes the deficiencies and projections of three 'institutional' accounts of Johnson's criticism before arguing that what Johnson actually wrote was painfully vigilant regarding its place in time and poignantly sceptical about the progression of ideas towards some delusive telos. Tom Mason and Adam Rounce re-read early criticism of Johnson's own criticism to analyse Johnson's survival as critical irritantin hostile texts, and to investigate his own sense of identification with still earlier critics like Dryden. Both essays perform an uneasy, dialectical engagement with a Johnsonian text that is already performing similarly in a self-questioning, provisional way, but which also has quite direct emotional and literary impact for modern readers. The other essays present fairlystraightforward cases for rehabilitation against offthe -peg modern assumptions. Clement Hawes invents the oxymoronic concept of 'cosmopolitan nationalism' to acquit Johnson of hegemonic colonization of Scotland and insular conceptionsof nationhood. James G Basker finds 'multicultural perspec? tives' on race and gender in Johnson's work to counter views that he was a supporter of slavery and patriarchy. Jaclyn Geller links Johnson's writerly support for women writers (including a young Mary Wollstonecraft) to his own novelistic interest in the 'marriage problem', while Danielle Insalaco uses his 'Life of Sarpi' to make a case for Johnson as a Europhile microhistorian. These reminders to read Johnson's actual work both in its contemporary agency and through the medium of modern theoretical concerns are all welcome; but we are hardly so committed nowadays to Johnson the monolith. Some ofthe straw men attacked by these essays are more full of chaffthan others: who, having read anything by Johnson, could conceive the idea that he was 'antihistoricaP (p. 99)? Some ofthe essays do quite a lot of careful ignoring on their own account. We do not hear much MLR, 98.4, 2003 969 of Johnson's anxious pulling of strings to secure the release of Frank Barber, his black servant, from the navy (whether he wanted to leave or not). That Johnson strongly supported many women intellectuals of his time is clear and important; that this support was far from universal, was qualified by some very conservative views, and sometimes concealed a sexual component, needs to be acknowledged also. Johnson was...