seen as a majorpioneer of the whole methodologyof readerresponseand reception. We have multifarioustracesof his readingsof Shakespeare,intimationsof an underlying and coherent understandingof the relationshipbetween text and reader, and a belief in a spectrum running from passive absorption in the text (empiricism), active recreationof the text in the unique reader'smind, throughto the creativityof the reader'sown poems. Out of this wealth of evidence, a strong argument could be mounted that the Romantics as a whole, led by Keats, really are the forefathers of some later schools of theory. UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA R. S. WHITE BritishDiscoveryLiterature and theRise of GlobalCommerce. By ANNANEILL.Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave. 2002. x + 229 pp. f45. ISBN0-333-97374-7. Whilst eighteenth-century literature of discovery and travel has undergone a renaissance recently, critics have been reluctant to explore in detail its complex relationshipwith the demands of an increasinglyglobal commerce. As Anna Neill points out in her introduction,there has been a greatdeal of interestin the dynamic interplay of centre and periphery but less in the pivotal role played by the 'de-socialized'travellerin the commercial 'modernization'of cultures. Connecting 'a globalism which was already dividing up the world according to the needs of commerce and manufacture'with 'fully-fledgedglobalization'(p. 29), Neill's project has obvious and immediate political resonance. Although she acknowledgesearly in her introductorychapter that her choice of texts is deliberatelyselective, the focus of Neill's second chapter upon the journals of William Dampier is almost too narrow.Whilst Dampier was indeed 'a piratical adventurerand a man of science and letters',a 'lawlessadventurerand an observer of plants, animals, peoples, winds and tides' (p. 31),he was far from unique. From an exploration of the paradoxes in Dampier's ethnographicodyssey of commercial and criminal endeavour, Neill traces its influence into the eighteenth century and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, TheFurther Adventures, and Captain Singleton in Chapter 3. A detailedand illuminatingoverviewof late seventeenth-and early-eighteenth-century mercantilistthought (from Grotius, Mun, Child, and Davenant to Locke's Second Treatise of Government and Defoe's own TheCompleat EnglishTradesman) is then used to demonstratethe way in which Defoe's mercantilistperspectiveupon state power and national wealth draws together his otherwise disparate characters. This perspective is implicitlychallenged in Chapter 4, in a considerationof Gulliver's Travels that exploresthe dialogue between Swift'sgrotesquesatireand Britain'seighteenthcentury geographers, most significantlyHerman Moll. Neill convincingly suggests that the improbable and marvellous characteristicsof Gulliver'sfictional voyages embody Swift's own scepticism concerning mercantilist globalism and economic nationalism.The connectionsbetween 'worldlinesss'and 'fancy'and the moral state of the traveller preoccupy Smollet's Roderick Randomand Johnson's Rasselasin Chapter 5. The impossibilityof reliablylocating any moral order in the actions of the former's 'picaro-rogue' and the latter's detached and sophisticated traveller point towardsan inabilityto reconcile patrioticpropagandawith 'the materialcontradictionscreatedby global commercialism'(p. I48).The finalchapterthen focuses upon the journal records of Captain Cook's three expeditions into the Pacific, and seen as a majorpioneer of the whole methodologyof readerresponseand reception. We have multifarioustracesof his readingsof Shakespeare,intimationsof an underlying and coherent understandingof the relationshipbetween text and reader, and a belief in a spectrum running from passive absorption in the text (empiricism), active recreationof the text in the unique reader'smind, throughto the creativityof the reader'sown poems. Out of this wealth of evidence, a strong argument could be mounted that the Romantics as a whole, led by Keats, really are the forefathers of some later schools of theory. UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA R. S. WHITE BritishDiscoveryLiterature and theRise of GlobalCommerce. By ANNANEILL.Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave. 2002. x + 229 pp. f45. ISBN0-333-97374-7. Whilst eighteenth-century literature of discovery and travel has undergone a renaissance recently, critics have been reluctant to explore in detail its complex relationshipwith the demands of an increasinglyglobal commerce. As Anna Neill points out in her introduction,there has been a greatdeal of interestin the dynamic interplay of centre and periphery but less in the pivotal role played by the 'de-socialized'travellerin the commercial 'modernization'of cultures. Connecting 'a globalism which was already dividing up the world according to the needs of commerce and manufacture'with 'fully-fledgedglobalization'(p. 29), Neill's project has obvious and...