REVIEWS 371 The weakness ofPagliaro's study appears when he engages directly with Fielding 's works. While Pagliaro's accounts of Fielding's many plays provide us with a means of assessing the development of Fielding's dramaturgy, they eventually begin to read like a catalogue ofplot summaries, a development that may be inevitable in a study that attempts to cover so much ground in so little space. Perhaps Pagliaro should have focused on a particular issue, formal or thematic, that informs each work as a way of giving a sharper edge to his readings. It seems odd that in his account of Tom Jones no mention of Jacobitism or the '45 should appear , especially since the study is intended to introduce the reader to the social and political contexts that shaped the author's writing. A student new to Fielding studies might appreciate the account of Fielding's formal strategies that Pagliaro's criticism sustains, but might not become aware of the complexity of the cultural concerns that informed Fielding's literary craft. Few of the insights provided by recent works of criticism—Jill Campbell's book on gender and Fielding, for example—make their way into Pagliaro's analyses. It is unfortunate that the editors of the Literary Lives series do not ask their authors to provide a bibliography of primary and secondary materials relating to their subject. Pagliaro's familiarity with the biographies and criticism ofFielding's work is apparent in the acumen with which he condenses a huge body of material into a single volume, and it is this acumen that will make Henry Fielding: A Literary Life a useful guide for students new to the field. Alison Conway University of Western Ontario Aileen Douglas, Patrick Kelly, and Ian Campbell Ross, eds. Locating Swift: Essays from Dublin on the 250th Anniversary of the Death of Jonathan Swift 1667-1745. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1998. 208pp. US$55.00. ISBN 1-85182-317-4. This volume derives from a commemorative conference on Swift held in 1995 at Trinity College, Dublin. Intended neither as a record nor as a representative sampling ofthe conference proceedings, the ten papers included here do represent, as the editors' introduction points out, the sizeable shift in Swift criticism since the publication oí Jonathan Swift 1667-1745: A Dublin Tercentenary Tribute, edited by Roger McHugh and Philip Edwards (1967), also the product of a Trinity College conference. Instead of a "tribute," the present collection offers approaches to repositioning Swift in his time and in our own. The introduction provides a valuable andjudicious summary ofthe effects literary theory and recent historical scholarship have produced in Swift studies over the last three decades, and looks as well to the directions ensuing research might take. The first two essays, by the Irish historians SJ. Connolly and Patrick Kelly, complicate the widespread understanding of Swift as an Irish patriot. The Dean of St Patrick's idiosyncrasy in the British intellectual and literary context of his 372 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 11:3 day is well established, but the abundance of writings by and about Swift in the 1720s and 1730s so outmatches evidence from other sources, Connolly argues, that he became a primary guide to Irish affairs in this period. Lately, however, an explosion of research, especially in Ireland, has questioned the veracity of his Irish descriptions. Some of these are simply exaggerated: Irishmen were more often appointed to public office in Ireland, for instance, than Swift was willing to admit. More fundamentally, his analysis of Ireland's poverty in the period is flawed: Ireland's poverty was the result not so much of the laziness of her poor or the rapacity ofthe landlords, or ofEnglish policy or neglect, as ofIreland's attempt "to sell agricultural produce in a predominantly agricultural Europe" (p. 39). For the Irish economy expanded significantly once transatlantic colonial markets were developed. Kelly, moreover, compares Swift as an economic thinker with his friend George Berkeley, who offered "novel economic analysis well-grounded in theory, while Swift, though recognising the bankruptcy of conventional wisdom, could only fall back on moral self-discipline and frugality" (p. 59). The next four essays focus upon Swift as a satirist...