17
Science and Medicine

Abstract

The works reviewed here explore a broad range of topics within the field of science, medicine, and technology studies. We have divided the chapter into three sections organized around a conceptual link. In the first section, Anna K. Sagal reviews two monographs that employ oceanic studies to explore novel forms of community and connection: Michele Currie Navakas’s Coral Lives: Literature, Labor, and the Making of America, and Hannah Freed-Thall’s Modernism at the Beach: Queer Ecologies and the Coastal Commons. In the second section, William J. Ryan examines two monographs that forcefully interrogate Western definitions of cognition and intellect: Sara E. Johnson’s Encyclopédie Noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint Méry’s Intellectual World and Abigail Williams’s Reading It Wrong: An Alternative History of Early Eighteenth-Century Literature. In the final section, Leah Benedict reviews an edited anthology that explores numerous exchanges between technology and culture: Kristen M. Girten and Aaron R. Hanlon’s British Literature and Technology, 1600–1830.

1. Oceans

Michele Currie Navakas’s Coral Lives: Literature, Labor, and the Making of America, combines the best of interdisciplinary thinking: inflecting the study of literature and history with philosophical, scientific, and anthropological ideas and methods with consistently sharp and insightful close reading. The archive from which she has drawn her primary materials is vast—spanning a truly transnational geography and ranging through novels, poetry, hymns, educational materials, scientific treatises, political speeches, newspaper articles, and much more—and yet each example and methodology is convincingly incorporated into her larger discussion of ‘coral’s cultural biography’ (p. 4). The broad strokes of her argument are thus: ‘in the nineteenth century a powerful set of ideas about coral shaped US thinking and writing about politics, broadly defined as a system of managing and distributing finite resources and care’, and these ideas provide modern readers insight into ‘the political pressures and debates specific to a culture formally dedicated to common good yet increasingly indebted to [slavery and its role in supporting capitalism]’ (pp. 2–4). One of the greatest strengths of this impressive argument is her deft acknowledgement of the complexity of the picture she works to paint:

For even, perhaps especially, when coral appears as mere ornament, curiosity, or romantic metaphor, it almost always also reflects and shapes complex conceptual thinking about labor and life, individual and collective, alternately generating visions of the common good and numerous forms of reckoning with or refusing characteristically US capitalist concerns and exclusions—sometimes within the very same text. (p. 4)

The book’s first chapter, ‘The Global Biography of Early American Coral’, surveys the ways in which the average American in the nineteenth century encountered coral, and what they did with it. It is organized through what Navakas calls ‘case studies’, focusing on three familiar objects, ‘red coral jewelry, the coral and bells, and coral reef specimens’ (p. 16). In addition to careful attention to well-known portraits and museum objects, she also shares with her readers visuals of rare paintings, material objects, and illustrations from a variety of disciplines, including pedagogical work, periodicals, poetry, and memoirs. The use of coral in material culture, as Navakas repeatedly emphasizes, was inextricable from the ways in which coral was sourced for the average US citizen. She pays particular attention to ‘the routes and practices of production, labor, and trade that brought raw coral and more finished objects into early US life’ (p. 15), underscoring the problematic and ambivalent underpinnings of this seemingly innocuous trinket as she explains that ‘specimen collection was rarely a racially innocent pursuit, especially in tropical places where coral grew and slavery flourished’ (p. 48).

Her second chapter, ‘Labors of the Coral’, focuses on a peculiar idea about coral biology that rapidly vanished from scientific thinking but remained influential for generations: the coral insect. Building upon the new nineteenth-century model of coral as part of a reef (and therefore a biological and social collective), this chapter uses the dissonance between scientific knowledge and its cultural application to highlight a ‘vibrant tradition of nineteenth-century US writing in which an ostensibly reassuring reef analogy repeatedly gives way to an account of inexhaustible laborers whose work generates not social recognition, liberty, or belonging but rather the essential foundation on which others thrive’ (p. 54). At the same time, however, Navakas is careful to consistently modulate this discussion of coral-reef-as-social-idea by reminding us that ‘Coral insects […] modeled a reality that many Americans found notoriously difficult to openly state: a country formally dedicated to the ideal of individual liberty for all had always required the disproportionate labor of those it excluded’ (p. 71). This chapter alone would be useful reading in an undergraduate or graduate class on American history.

‘Fathomless Forms of Life’, the book’s third chapter, traces the trajectory of Western scientific understandings of coral, alongside the economic pathways in which it traveled, drawing attention again to the ways in which the ‘cultural biography’ elucidated in the previous chapters was facilitated by its embeddedness in slavery and colonial oppression. Inspired by current scholarship that works at the intersections of the history of science and literature, Navakas skillfully demonstrates that seemingly obscure debates about coral biology (in specialized texts like Charles Darwin’s 1842 The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs) profoundly informed broader philosophical perspectives on class, society, and race. She argues that ‘The natural history of coral […] cast doubt on the correspondence between visible and invisible’, and that ‘as coral’s historic taxonomic context reemerged and circulated alongside coral itself in nineteenth-century US schoolrooms, boarding houses, churches, and parlors, it encouraged generations of Americans to speculate that knowledge required resisting the impulse to name and know and rank based on appearances’ (p. 78).

In her fourth chapter, ‘Coral Collectives’, Navakas identifies two related trends in nineteenth-century US literature: white authors who used coral to metaphorically argue that ‘by merely living together under US democracy, the country entire had now become a coral island that grows progressively by way of mutual sustenance’, and Black authors ‘who [rejected] that claim and instead [exhorted] people to act in ways that could eventually render the US as mutually sustaining as a Darwinian coastal island, a process that must begin by recognizing that presently only some of us are the bond-building polyps’ (p. 98). In other words, arguments about the role of labor in this social context were almost never separated from race (even if race is elided), which allowed for Black authors and activists to use the racial logics offered by white writers to offer visions of new paths forward. Navakas explains that ‘Reefs abetted Black political theorizing by materially modeling the particular claim that a single and seemingly insignificant entity, by way of the relations it creates and sustains with other entities past and present, might transform the entire system into something new and different’ (p. 114). Her use of racial and cultural theory here reveals the thoughtful theoretical underpinnings of this project, and the extent to which Navakas consistently attends to the racial aspects of even the putatively positive deployments of coral.

The fifth chapter, ‘Red Coral, Black Atlantic’, is one that will be of particular interest to scholars of nineteenth-century American literature, and particularly students of the novel. The chapter tracks coral as jewelry and ornament, and how its use ‘across the Atlantic world—from Senegal, Guinea, and Nigeria through Jamaica and New Orleans’ offers a material history that can be used ‘to reinterpret US novels and stories of slavery and race as unlikely sites of knowledge about the Black Atlantic diaspora’ (p. 13). Navakas focuses on five texts where items made of coral ‘drive the story because of what Black women knew about them’: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852); Epes Sargent’s Peculiar: A Tale of the Great Transition (1864); George Washington Cable’s The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life (1880); Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (1893); and Charles W. Chesnutt’s ‘Her Virginia Mammy’ (1899). Her own interpretative work is persistently intertwined with attention to historical texts, refraining from reading this fiction as ‘documentary’, but rather as almost ‘ethnographic’, arguing that ‘these texts can become useful sources of knowledge about the subjects they portray when we read them with caution and corroborate them with reference to one another and to other types of sources, such as oral traditions, archaeological evidence, and histories of Afro-Atlantic customs and performances’ (p. 127).

A brief but powerful coda crystallizes the ethical imperative she traces through the monograph—the extent to which coral reef as metaphor could be deployed in various critical ways in the past suggests to a modern American (and global) audience the importance of ‘a historically oriented environmental humanities’, and demonstrates how we might use such a methodology as ‘a rejection of the triumphalist arc of history’ (p. 151). Coral Lives is thus at once a skillful close reading of the past, a nuanced interpretation of historical texts, ideas, and economic and scientific patterns, and also an inspiring manifesto for scholars and activists today.

The monograph I pair with Coral Lives is Hannah Freed-Thall’s equally impressive Modernism at the Beach: Queer Ecologies and the Coastal Commons. Like Navakas, Freed-Thall deftly weaves together a bevy of intellectual disciplines, here including history, literature, visual and performance art, queer theory, music, and dance. These monographs are not only valuable and insightful in conversation with one another because of their methodology, however, or because they are written by literature scholars with impressive interdisciplinary chops. I read them together because each represents the kind of ambitious scholarship that one hopes to see in the field moving forward, offering new and invigorating interpretations of the past that attend to racial, social, and sexual difference through lenses of scientific history and its accompanying environmental urgency for the twenty-first century. The fact that both Navakas and Freed-Thall chose marine environments says something particular about the ocean and its products and how we might use such ecological spaces to interpret human stories anew. Each suggests that there might be something unique to humanity’s relationship with the ocean that spans each and every aspect of our society, and, consequently, that attentiveness to those marine spaces and objects can highlight continuities of the past and offer hope for moving forward.

Modernism at the Beach looks to the ‘modernist beach’ as a site of encounter, arguing that ‘in twentieth-century literature, especially, the shore appears as a transitional space, a terraqueous ribbon suspended between the militarized roadways of the sea, the verticality and velocity of the metropolis, and the heteronormative architecture of the home’ (p. 1). By building upon this notion of the beach as ‘transitional’ and therefore offering a space for play, experimentation, and escape from rigid social conventions, this monograph combines studies of canonical modernist fiction by Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Claude McKay with an ecological guide by Rachel Carson, and a range of modern visual art and dance performances. Once again, the interdisciplinarity of this work is vital to the author’s argument for ‘a longer history of the littoral as a space of alterity and resistance: an arena for queer and creaturely encounters, a refuge for artists and other visionary types, a terrain of unremitting impermanence, and a precarious commons in which to dream up other possible futures’ (p. 2). Provocatively, Freed-Thall argues that ‘to think about the beach is to think about the history of sexuality—and to explore the confluence of queer studies and ecological thought’ (p. 18). Notably, she is careful to explain that she doesn’t always use ‘queer’ in an identitarian sense, but rather, sometimes, ‘as an orientation toward offbeat intimacies and improper affiliations’ (p. 65). At the same time, Freed-Thall is remarkably attentive to histories of queer sexuality both within these texts and as part of the cultural milieu in which they are produced, a testament to both her exhaustive archival work and dazzling talent at close reading.

In her first chapter, ‘Proust’s Leap’, Freed-Thall sifts through the lesser-studied volumes of In Search of Lost Time and reads their focus on embodiment as exemplifying a kind of queer movement that seems only possible in a beach setting. The author does so by pairing Proust’s work with the movies of Charlie Chaplin and performances of the Ballets Russes—a seemingly discordant coupling that ultimately makes perfect sense. Freed-Thall argues that ‘the seaside is a crucial, critically underexamined setting’ in Proust’s work, and offers a tripartite argument for her innovative foray into well-worn scholarly terrain. She begins by focusing on how ‘expected social hierarchies and rituals of invitation and introduction give way to an atmosphere in which contingency rules’, and shows how ‘the beach […] enables a new conception of the body in time’, ultimately making an argument for ‘Proust’s beach as a perceptual phenomenon, and Balbec (the beach town) as the novel’s primary setting for aesthetic invention’ (p. 35). Freed-Thall innovatively theorizes the ‘leap’ in Proust by using a roving group of young girls at the seaside, arguing that in their carefree, almost hectic movement, they ‘draw on the plot-distorting energy of the epic leap—and yet, as “ancient” as their art may be [their] gender-bending, collective disregard for the traditional rules of genre is the mark of their modernity, and Balbec’s’ (p. 52). Here is where the film and ballet tie in, as she argues that ‘in his turn toward the beach as a setting for kinesthetic expression, Proust brings his novel into conversation with early twentieth-century mass cultural and avant-garde art forms’ (p. 53).

Literary scholars may find the second chapter, ‘Intertidal Woolf’, to be the most valuable, because it takes an exhaustively discussed novel, To the Lighthouse (1927), and offers exciting new theories about its significance in modernist literature and in Woolf’s oeuvre. In brief, she argues that the novel ‘[represents] the beach as terrain that unsettles a Victorian epistemological and domestic inheritance’ through unmarriageable or queer-type characters that ‘elucidate other, less productive and accountable ways of being in time’ (p. 66). Instead of dwelling on the dichotomies between the domestic and productive, Freed-Thall argues that ‘between the maternal pole of house […] and the paternal pole of the lighthouse […] we find the intertidal zone, where different sociabilities and gender dynamics might be tested and negotiated’ (p. 74). Just as the previous chapter relied upon theorizations of modern dance and the emerging ideas about physical movement that played out in the world around Proust as he was writing, this chapter reflects the author’s impressive grasp of music and music theory to analyse the queer narrative energy of the novel via acoustic ‘beats’ in dialogue and description. Through yet another impressive display of close reading, Freed-Thall argues that the novel doesn’t just remind us of sound, but that ‘it is about rhythm as an aesthetic and sociobiological force: rhythm as the spacing of sound or movement in time and as the means by which normative patterns are inculcated on a corporeal level’, a claim that relates to her ideas about chrono-normativity and the ways in which some characters push beyond it (pp. 77–79).

The third chapter, ‘Carson’s Quiet Bower’, features Rachel Carson’s less well-known The Edge of the Sea (1955), arguing that it is ‘not only a work of marine biology but a performance of close reading and an experiment in queer ecology […] an homage to misfit intimacies [… and] midcentury feminine interior[s]’ (p. 98). In this chapter, Freed-Thall ‘considers Carson’s ecological imagination’ in the context of the long-distance queer epistolary romance Carson maintained with Dorothy Freeman (p. 98). Relying upon autobiographical context to tie together ‘two distinct modalities of queerness’, Freed-Thall argues that ‘Carson’s vision of the tidelands, like her bond with Freeman, was marked by a nonpossessive ethos of intermittency and variation’ (p. 111). The author’s attentiveness to the physicality of The Edge of the Sea is also remarkable. Presented in contradistinction to the other most popular guidebook of the period, Jack Calvin and Ed Rickett’s 1939 Between Pacific Tides (which she reads as ‘an insouciant hymn to automobility, intoxication, and homosocial male bonds’), Carson’s guidebook, instead, ‘attends to patterns of shared existence, examining how biotic communities create conditions of refuge for one another’ (p. 101). This distinction, Freed-Thall argues, is found most obviously in the interplay of text and illustrations in The Edge of the Sea, in which the ‘images do not so much demand our attention as drift or burrow into view, transforming the book’s pages into spaces of the underwater’, while the images in Between Pacific Tides ‘serve the larger objective of presenting the Pacific coast in as totalizing a fashion as possible’ (pp. 114–15). This chapter is a wonderful example of literary and aesthetic approaches to ostensibly non-literary texts.

‘McKay’s Dream Port’, the fourth chapter, ‘explores the phenomenon of the beach-as-commons—a gathering space or meeting grounds that cannot be entirely enclosed or reduced to real estate’, and pairs it with artwork on or about the Chelsea piers in the 1970s and 1980s not only to highlight the ‘contestatory queer utopianism of McKay’s diasporic littoral zone’ (pp. 30–31) but also to investigate ‘utopianism’s radical edge more explicitly, foregoing the spectacle of casinos, hotels, and automobile rides […] in order to explore transgressive acts of contact, exhibition, and assembly’ (p. 123). Informed by both a conscientious accounting of Black queer radical tradition and nuanced theorizing of the commons socially and ecologically, Freed-Thall reads the ‘relation between the leisure beach and the working waterfront’ through the concept of the port, which she describes as a ‘zone of encounter, marketplaces for both commodified and noncommodified forms of pleasure’, a characterization that renders these spaces ‘alluring milieus for artists and other visionary types’ (p. 126). As with many of the other chapters, the pairing of a work of canonical modernism with other, newer, forms of beach-related art is highly successful, showcasing the author’s talents at reading both close and wide in a compelling and exciting project.

The final chapter, ‘Tidewrack, Beckett to Sunde’, departs most noticeably from modernism, but does so in a way that feels entirely appropriate to a work that has consistently considered reimaginings of the queer ethos of modernist beaches—as space, as play, as movement, as sound—in later twentieth- and twenty-first-century works of art. Freed-Thall reads contemporary photography and sculpture ‘made in the medium of oceanic plastic and durational performances set on artificial beaches’, arguing that although beaches have become ‘emblems of capitalist exhaustion’ these works of art in particular offer a ‘spectacle of exhaustion [that] gestures toward other potential futures’ (p. 31). She begins by ‘[considering] visual art made in the medium of sea trash, asking how such works magnify lags and dissonances within the seemingly streamlined reorganization of the globe’, and segues into reading ‘performances in which the human body itself materializes as tidewrack’ (p. 149), once again successfully underscoring the uneasy dissonance between leisure and capitalism, heteropatriarchy and queer embodiment, and chrono-normativity and queer time that characterizes the beach throughout Modernism at the Beach. Here also, the author’s attentiveness to modes of thinking rooted in music and dance showcases the impressive interdisciplinary toolkit she brings to close-reading texts, and reminds us all that true interdisciplinarity can be quite remarkable. This chapter will be especially of interest to students of modern and contemporary art, as well as ecologists of all stripes.

2. Intellect

Sara E. Johnson’s Encyclopédie noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Intellectual World, asks us to see past, or better, around, its titular biographical subject. In this innovative book, Johnson crafts a ‘communal biography’ of Moreau—the French creole legal scholar, natural historian, translator, printer, and enslaver—which highlights the people of African descent whose stolen labor and lives enabled Moreau to become a figure worth historical attention (p. 4). This methodologically original and exciting work challenges historians of science, law, and language, as well as those who study the literary and visual culture of the eighteenth century, to not only recognize that creole intellectuals like Moreau accomplished ‘these things because of, not despite, [their] investment in slavery’, but further to envision and present the interior lives and lived experience of those they enslaved. Through her masterful use of varied archival sources and creative deployment of contemporary reimaginings of historical materials, Johnson brings forward a cast of people—hairdressers, wet nurses, translators, bookbinders, laundresses, cooks—whose invisible labor and knowledge we encounter when we study the eighteenth century. Like other recent work in the field of early American history, Johnson’s study forcefully challenges us to move beyond our linguistic, national, and disciplinary divides in order to see early American history as ‘a web whose skeins encompass stories that are geographically diverse (intra-American, transatlantic, transpacific), linguistically rich, and deeply mired in the racial and class fault lines of the Age of Revolutions’ (p. 4).

As the notion of a ‘communal biography’ would suggest, Johnson’s work eschews conventional chronology, utilizing instead an innovative structure to pair more familiar scholarly argument with informed speculation and creative reimagining built on serialized anecdotes about enslaved people. The book consists of a brief introduction, framing her subject and method, and eight chapters. Five of those eight chapters follow the familiar format of a scholarly monograph. However, the remaining three include what Johnson calls her Encyclopédie noire, a reimagining of the French Enlightenment genre par excellence which provides entries for key terms, concepts, and individuals from across Moreau’s oeuvre. For example, in the first section of the Encyclopédie Johnson includes an entry on a woman named Angélique, enslaved by Moreau, who worked as a wet nurse. Angélique was a ‘Black creole woman’, roughly the same age as Moreau, who had two children, also manumitted with her, as well as a possible third child roughly the same age as Moreau’s own mixed-race daughter, Aménaïde (who has her own separate entry in the Encyclopédie). Angélique also performed the same work for the Spanish military officer Don Bernardo de Gálvez, thereby demonstrating how the intimate forced labor of enslaved people ‘cut across competing colonial regimes’ (p. 33). In order to tell Angélique’s story, Johnson brings together archival evidence that is ‘visual, notarial, periodical, [and] natural historical’, which she then weaves into a more coherent historical whole (p. 31). As is the case with Angélique, Aménaïde, and others like them, in Johnson’s work ‘fragments accrue […] to open up vistas into occluded lives’ (p. 18). Johnson’s Encyclopédie spans twenty-six entries across three chapters in the book, covering historical figures like Angélique and Aménaïde as well as topics such as ‘Aradas: a West African ethnic group known for the Kreyol speaking skills in Saint Domingue’, or ‘Maison de Sainte: hospital for enslaved African women and men sickened during the Middle Passage’, and ‘Esclavage: a “moral sore”’ (pp. 23, 127). Entries span between two and ten pages, and the Encyclopédie as a whole serves to imitate the generic forms and polymath interests of Moreau and other colonizers. Moreau left an unpublished and incomplete Encyclopédie of his own, which Johnson draws on in order to recreate the lives and experiences of the people who are not only spread across his archive, but who provided the knowledge and performed the varied forms of labor which afforded the leisure for his scholarly pursuits. In this way, Johnson centers the enslaved African as an integral figure in the history of Enlightenment knowledge production. ‘I repurpose the master’s tools to dismantle his house and ideology’, she writes, ‘in part by showing that these tools were never solely his in the first place’ (p. 6).

Four additional chapters are interspersed between the sections of Johnson’s Encyclopédie, each focused on an aspect of Moreau’s business and scholarly pursuits. Johnson creatively redeploys and revises the archive of the colonial Enlightenment to both center enslaved Africans and critique the colonizer. In Chapter 2, ‘Unflattering Portraits: A Visual Critique’, for instance, Johnson takes ‘Moreau’s interest in cultivating a public facing persona as a challenge to engage the act of visual perception itself’ (p. 63). To do so, the chapter repeatedly juxtaposes images associated with Moreau—portraits of Moreau and his daughter, for example, or a series of engravings of idealized colonial scenes by Agostino Brunias that Moreau printed in his law and history works—with the work of contemporary Afro-Caribbean and Afro-diasporic artists. Johnson’s intervention with contemporary artists seeks to ‘link the development of an art form—portraiture—with the escalation of the transatlantic slave trade’ (p. 69). The chapter thus uses ‘pairing and juxtaposition as a form of critique’, analysing portraits of Moreau and his daughter before expanding the aperture to imagine a scene in which enslaved individuals perform the forced labor undergirding the self-presentation of the colonizer. As Johnson writes, ‘Unfreedom correlates to the planter class’s experience of freedom. This cannot be said, or seen, enough’ (p. 63).

The third chapter, ‘Print Culture and the Empires of Slavery’, uses Moreau’s time in Philadelphia as a way to both connect his communal biography to the history of printing and bookselling in the United States and also to ‘untell’ the history of slavery in the Atlantic world. According to Johnson, ‘untelling’ means ‘to glean meaning from the design of the words and the material conditions that made their production possible, not simply from the words themselves’ (p. 88). Johnson demonstrates how Moreau’s print and translation projects—particularly his own autobiographical defense of Caribbean slavery and a translated and heavily annotated edition of a travel narrative to the Far East by a Dutch diplomat—relied on knowledge from enslaved people. Through deft readings of Moreau’s typography, footnoting, and editing practices, Johnson argues that Moreau shows a mastery of colonial knowledge that he only had access to because of his enslaving people. In this way, ‘aesthetic projects and slaveholding practices must be read as mutually informing’ (p. 90). This chapter presents an integral connection between a figure at the center of French Caribbean studies and the study of literary production in the late eighteenth-century United States. ‘Moreau’s web of collaborators’ in Philadelphia, Johnson writes, ‘illustrates the undervalued impact that the French and Haitian revolutions had on the emerging US print industry’ (p. 109). Johnson further connects the sumptuous and exotic nature of his books to the plantation system that underwrote the entire project. Connecting his work to that of other natural historians like Mark Catesby, Hans Sloane, or John James Audubon, Johnson demonstrates how ‘the slave trade was intertwined with the emergence of books as bourgeoisie luxury items, as museum like, as encyclopedic in breadth and knowledge’ (p. 122).

The inextricable connections among natural historical knowledge production, printing and bookmaking, and Caribbean slavery are further developed in Chapters 5 and 6, ‘Unnatural History’ and ‘“You Are a Poisoner”’, albeit with a turn to language and linguistics. Moreau was instrumental in translating and printing dictionaries and pronunciation guides for West African and Indigenous American languages aimed at planters, a history that Johnson elucidates through a careful and detailed analysis of the specific phrases included in such books, as well as Moreau’s use of paratextual annotations to assert his own mastery over African and Indigenous knowledge. Johnson thus argues for ‘the study of language as a means of asserting power over colonized people, the pilfering of knowledge created by non-European others as a means for white intellectuals to accrue social position, and the omnipresence of violence’ (p. 155). The following chapter extends this analysis through informed speculation about how such language was used by planters, and, more importantly, experienced and understood by enslaved people. By imagining moments in which certain words or phrases were used, Johnson aims to move beyond understanding ‘the process of colonization from the perspective of the colonizer’ in order ‘to imagine the printed words on the page as utterances within a sociohistorical context’ (p. 188). This requires deep knowledge of people like Moreau, who used the phrases, but also ‘informed speculation to include the perspectives of those who heard some approximation of the Kikongo shouted at them in anger or whispered to them in the slave quarters by those to whom the language did not belong’ (p. 189). In the end, these two chapters provide a compelling and urgent case that ‘any history of the Americas cannot be told through European languages alone’ (p. 155).

Johnson’s closing chapter, ‘Illustrative Storytelling’, marks her most radical and important departure from the conventions of the scholarly monograph. The chapter takes as its starting point the assertion that ‘Scholars of the enslaved are confronted with the evidence of things not seen. Unrecorded experiences. Unvoiced motivations. These silences constitute the recessed corners of the past’ (p. 215). The chapter then proceeds through a series of linguistic and visual puzzles, all built on analysis presented in the previous chapters or in the various entries of the Encyclopédie noire. For instance, in a disorienting ‘listening puzzle’ that draws on the phrasebooks and phonetic dictionaries of West African languages discussed in Chapter 5, Johnson ‘converts what one might have heard into that which is seen and must be decoded as written signs’ (p. 218). Similarly, Johnson creates visual puzzles from the brand that two enslaved women, Thérèse and Magdeleine, had on their bodies. The brand is rendered on the page right-to-left and upside down, so as to recreate the perspective from which the women would have seen it, thereby providing insight, however brief, into ‘the thought and affective process imposed on a person becoming someone different as a result of enslavement’ (p. 225). These attempts to narrate history from the perspective of the enslaved rather than that of the enslavers is fully realized in an ‘Interiorized Natural History’: a series of vignettes, at points rendered in the first person, imagining the story of an enslaved woman, Rosette, who escaped to a community of maroons in Saint Domingue. Through these creative exercises, Johnson powerfully calls for a reorientation of our scholarship, not only what we study but how we try to know it. Colonial authorities, she writes, ‘cannot have undisputed narrative authority. Informed speculation can disrupt this legacy of dominance […] This type of critical creative exercise need not always make it into the final drafts of our work in order for reorientation of perspective to occur’ (p. 231). Here, as in her use of the Encyclopédie form, Johnson calls us to view the archive of enslavement ‘as a platform to see other things’ (p. 238). In this way her communal biography demonstrates that the value of a figure like Moreau, and others like him in the historical record, is how ‘we notice other lives, and hear, however faintly and often through amplification and speculation, other stories’ (p. 244). Johnson’s work thus not only offers us new ways to approach the archive, but also encourages us to reconsider whose stories we tell, and how we tell them.

Another way of considering Johnson’s approach to her biographical subject, and to how we consider literary and cultural history, is to acknowledge we have been guilty of a kind of misreading. In this way, her work shares a thematic approach with the second book under consideration in this section of the review, Abigail Williams’s Reading It Wrong: An Alternative History of Early Eighteenth-Century Literature. Although its ostensible subject—the political satires and allegories of the Augustan age—is far afield from Johnson’s in Encyclopédie noire, the books overlap in how each author aims to amplify the historical voices we have not always heard, or have not listened to. In so doing, both Johnson and Williams challenge Enlightenment assumptions about rationality, knowledge, and the right way to produce scholarship, some of which still haunt us today. Or, as Williams writes in her introduction, in the eighteenth century, as in the twenty-first, ‘investment in Enlightenment and expertise hinders the recognition of ignorance, muddle, and incompetence’ (p. 2).

Across its introduction, nine chapters, and brief afterword, Williams’s Reading It Wrong explores ‘the role of imperfect readers and misreading in early eighteenth-century literary culture’ (p. 1). This period, as she notes in the introduction, was marked by a tension in the English reading world: an explosion in printed material, along with an attendant growth in readership, corresponded with an age of satire, or what she calls ‘densely referential literary forms that relied on reader interaction’ (p. 5). One result, she elaborates, of ‘when tricky books collided with a transformed marketplace’, was a ‘culture of misunderstanding’ that literary history has not yet accounted for (p. 9). Williams recreates this ‘cloud of unknowing’ through careful analysis of archival materials—marginalia, diaries, commonplace books, and correspondence between readers—as well as new readings of canonical texts from Alexander Pope, Johnathan Swift, Eliza Haywood, and Daniel Defoe. Her argument lays out the ways in which misreading is ‘productive […] of argument, intimacy, and social cohesion’, as a counterpoint to how ‘[o]ur dominant models for thinking about ignorance—shame and silence—equip us poorly for framing […] misunderstanding in positive ways’ (p. 11). Her book thus narrates a ‘lost history of misunderstanding’ (p. 20). While the early eighteenth century is often understood as a period in which ‘spheres of knowledge […] were opening up through the democratization of literature, or the spread of Enlightenment values’, her work points out that ‘this was also a literary culture in which muddle and uncertainty were at the heart of the reading experience’ (p. 20).

Williams’s first four chapters provide an overview of four types of reader in early eighteenth-century England: ‘The Good Reader’, ‘The Christian Reader’, ‘The Classical Reader’, and ‘The Literary Reader’. In her first chapter, Williams surveys twentieth-century theories of reading, themselves predicated on a ‘good’ historical reader, in order to demonstrate how our scholarly, editorial, and pedagogical practices rely on a ‘generalized sense of readerly competence’, or ‘a hypothetical sense of the reciprocal dynamic between authorial intention and reader complicity’ (pp. 33–34). Her discussion of ‘The Christian Reader’ in the following chapter establishes the urgency of good reading, especially when one’s salvation could depend on it, while also revealing how ‘the epistemological questions arising from scriptural encounter provide an essential background for thinking about models for puzzled comprehension’ (p. 42). The paratextual apparatus that developed around Scripture—including biblical commentaries, as well as marginal glosses and summaries—demonstrates the accommodation of misreading and provides a model of interpretative scaffolding for the secular satires of the era. Chapters 3 and 4, addressing first ‘The Classical Reader’ and then ‘The Literary Reader’, emphasize how, despite aspirations and pretenses to the contrary, inexpert readers drove print production in early eighteenth-century England. Even in an era characterized, in part, by a battle between the ‘ancients’ and the ‘moderns’, Williams writes, ‘if we encounter the witty, learned, heavily referential neoclassical satires of the early eighteenth century and read them assuming that they were immediately understood and wholly accessible to their first readers we are probably wrong’ (p. 73). As she continues in the following chapter, readers of periodicals like The Tatler, The Spectator, The Female Spectator, and The Athenian Mercury ‘demonstrated the ways in which the emerging print culture of the period was shaped by the needs and interests of curious and non expert readers’ (p. 107). Williams demonstrates how readers of periodicals, as well as classical works in translation or satires and mock-epics, often focused their annotations on isolated takeaways rather than holistic, or ‘right’, interpretations, which she considers another ‘form of misreading’ (p. 112).

The remaining chapters turn from addressing the various types of ‘wrong’ reader to analysing specific instances of misreading in the period and the complex implications for the eighteenth, as well as the twenty-first, century. Chapter 5, ‘Mind the Gap’, begins with a reading of a particularly fraught and challenging political text from the era, the manuscript Poems on the Affairs of State. Despite the robust modern scholarly apparatus dedicated to unpacking the deliberate omissions and obscure references which characterize this collection of court poems, Williams attests to ‘both an imperfect or partial comprehension of the text and forms of response that betray different points of engagement’ for readers in the period (p. 132). As such, contemporary edited volumes remove ‘an inscrutability that was always part of the reading experience’ (p. 133). One effect of such inscrutability can be seen in Chapter 6, ‘The Intimacy of Omission’, as the analysis shifts from misreading political texts to misreading a text about social intimacy, Pope’s 1712 The Rape of the Lock. Like other forms of sociable verse in the period, Pope’s poem tantalizes the reader by at once proffering and denying public access to the private sphere. However, rather than alienating readers, Williams demonstrates how ‘the fact of not knowing formed a sociable bond between one reader and another’ (p. 166).

In addition to producing social bonds among readers, early eighteenth-century misreading could be productive, particularly of explanatory texts. ‘Unlocking the Past’, Chapter 7, focuses on the proliferation of ‘keys’ to the myriad allegories and secret histories that were produced during the Augustan age. Rather than providing a point of frustration, readerly misunderstanding begat a market for more books: ‘keys marketized readerly uncertainty, withholding information to generate additional publications’ (p. 183). While such texts often provided conflicting, or even deliberately wrong, interpretations, their widespread publication suggests how a culture of misreading ‘encouraged hermeneutic suspicion’ (p. 171). Such suspicion came to have legal consequences, as demonstrated in Chapter 8, ‘Out of Control’. In this chapter, Williams contends that Daniel Defoe’s arrest and subsequent punishment for the 1702 publication of his satirical The Shortest Way with Dissenters ‘marks a high-water mark of unintended misreading in this period’ (p. 197). Noting connections to political satire in the twenty-first-century digital world, Williams demonstrates how misreading came to be weaponized by those who opposed Defoe. While some readers demonstrated their passionate opposition to the satirical voice presented in Shortest Way, thereby signaling their agreement with the author’s intended stance, ‘there were also those who deliberately misread ironic intention in political commentary as a way of discrediting or damaging the author’ (p. 214).

In the book’s last full chapter, ‘Messing with Readers’, Williams turns to Pope’s The Dunciad (1728), a text that brings together various strands of misreading that have been addressed throughout the monograph as a whole. In reading across the multiple editions of the text and responses to it, both printed and marginal, she concludes that Pope ‘mocked the process of understanding and the application of knowledge’, making The Dunciad the apotheosis of the era of misreading (p. 225). Reading the era of misreading, as Williams does, offers us an important corrective about our scholarly and pedagogical reading: ‘The goal of the editor and the teacher is to make the works of the past accessible, but if the aim of the work is to bamboozle and wrongfoot the reader, perhaps we need a different approach, one which acknowledges the limits of explication and the role of partial comprehension’ (p. 245). Along with Johnson, Williams highlights the virtues of not knowing, of developing understanding based on partial comprehension, and acknowledges the urgency of misreading as ‘a populist hermeneutics of suspicion has come to shape geopolitical realities in ways that would have seemed unthinkable three decades past’ (p. 247). Such a disposition may seem anathema to scholarship. After all, Williams notes, ‘footnotes are rarely question marks’ (p. 249). But taken together these two books suggest that perhaps they sometimes should be.

3. Technology

Kirsten M. Girten and Aaron R. Hanlon’s anthology, British Literature and Technology, 1600–1830, explores the ways in which technology and literature continually make and remake themselves and each other, both parts acting as font and product of human imagination and ingenuity; and just as they inform one another, they also transform the context that produced them. As Girten and Hanlon write in their introduction, ‘we use tools to shape ourselves and our surroundings, and the tools we use come to shape us as well’ (p. 2). The volume avoids over-generalizing this process: like the best of the scholarship that precedes them, the authors do not pretend that chronology is identical to cause and effect, nor do they offer an elaborate hagiography of authors or inventors. Instead, the chapters examine distinctive milieus of literary and technological exchange, where accidents, misunderstandings, dissembling, greed, and outright bigotry are just as impactful as benevolence, wit, or skill. Along with the grander pressures exerted by trade, war, and the abundance or scarcity of goods, their studies of technologies simmer within a stew informed by other more specific material pressures, from the contours of a landscape to the brightness of a lantern, the malleability of wax, or the elasticity of a vaginal canal.

As the title suggests, the focus of the book is tethered loosely to a place and time: mostly Britain, and a hair over two centuries. This limit generates one of the major strengths of the book, especially when considered as a teaching tool: despite the proximity of their historical context, each chapter demands its own unique pathway of research and yields its own unique conclusions. To study, as Girten and Hanlon put it, ‘literature as technology but also literature and technology’ is to assemble a distinctive archive (usually spanning numerous disciplines, forms, and genres) tailored precisely to the contact zone between them (p. 3). In the anthology’s conclusion, Joseph Drury identifies one of the key obstacles to the study of literature and technology: where the study of literature and science has gained institutional support, scholars of literature and technology often find themselves sorted into the category of science studies. ‘But’, as Drury explains, ‘while the making of scientific knowledge almost always requires some kind of technology, technologies do not always involve science or scientists’ (p. 164). He continues, ‘The key questions and methodological problems raised by reading literature in relation to the history of technology are therefore distinct from—and need to be theorized independently from—those raised by studying it in relation to the history of science’ (p. 164). The chapters included within more than rise to this provocation, demonstrating close attention to the singular ways technologies imprint themselves into culture.

Several notable entries populate the work. In her study of Webster, Laura Francis explores the semiotic utility of wax in The Duchess of Malfi and shows how its capacity for representation eclipses its own specific materiality. Wax, like language, often stands for things other than itself, and it emerges through her essay as a metaphor, an anatomical organ, an artisanal prototype, and a murder scene. As Francis demonstrates, Webster employs wax’s transformative properties to ‘test the bodily instruments of perception and judgement’ and to challenge viewers’ ability to discern the real from the illusory (p. 26). Thomas A. Oldham similarly explores the pitfalls of bodily discernment by presenting his examination of the virginity test portrayed in Three Hours After Marriage beside the deliberate mystification of the forceps in early eighteenth-century obstetrics. Just as the ‘Touchstone of Virginity’ comedically generates false certainties concerning the open secret of Lady Fossile’s chastity, forceps were ‘cloaked in secrecy yet exhibited with theatricality’ (pp. 50, 52). Oldham asks important questions about the degree to which definitions of virginity and birth rely upon such performances, and the ways medical technologies can mislead in the search for corporeal truth. Jamison Kantor’s chapter moves away from the unitary body to focus upon ‘political machines’, ‘state machinery’, and other similar mechanistic metaphors of government in the works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (pp. 140, 141). Throughout the chapter, Kantor reminds readers that debates around such national machines must invariably override or redefine the place of actual bodies, and he shows how Shelley portrays the chronic encouragement for the people to ‘sacrifice their bodies to revise a nationalist sentimentalism that was essential to Whig politics’ (p. 147). Though not the focus of his chapter, Kantor’s inclusion of pages from William Hone’s The Divine Right of Kings to Govern Wrong might encourage a bracing trans-historical conversation concerning the self-perpetuating machinations—or algorithms—of tyranny.

Erik L. Johnson, Emily M. West, and Kevin MacDonnell all explore different valences of aesthetics and experience. Johnson’s chapter tells how the increasing precision of time-keeping devices changed understandings of a day, hour, and minute, but also amplifies their proneness to failure. Using the works of Mary Hearne and Daniel Defoe as his primary objects of study, Johnson demonstrates how ‘the detail of temporal accountings that these authors put on display does not so much establish order as reveal its fragility’ (p. 32). Johnson is less concerned with the way that clocks newly regimented the eighteenth-century subject’s day-to-day reality than he is with how the drive toward a perfect measurement of time created ever more brittle temporalities, and he raises fascinating questions regarding duration, presence, sequence, and true synchrony. Emily West’s chapter focuses upon the semiotic value of the ornate lantern hanging in the staircase at Strawberry Hill, Horace Walpole’s medieval-inspired home. West shows how the aesthetic design of the lantern replicates the queer assemblages found in the works of more contemporary scholarship. While this might feel ahistorical on its face, West demonstrates how aspects of the lantern’s material form solidly rest within queer aesthetic frameworks—the limitations of its range of light, its rejection of narrative futurity, and, most persuasively, Walpole’s own characterization of the lantern’s mixing of Asian and Gothic aesthetics as an ‘unnatural copulation’ (p. 108). Kevin MacDonnell presents a riveting analysis of Hogarth’s ‘line of beauty’ or ‘serpentine line’ as a kind of hinge that connects an aesthetic derived from natural, organic influences to the underlying form of Watt’s steam engine, a device frequently linked to the dawn of the Anthropocene (p. 80). He raises heady questions about how contemporary impressions of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory are affected by the increased visibility of its formative influence upon industrial capitalism. His conclusion takes a surprising turn toward Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, to show how those same influences have led—and still can lead—to remarkably different material outcomes.

Zachary M. Mann and Deven M. Parker tilt the balance of their enquiry more solidly into technological design and implementation. Mann makes a compelling argument regarding the prominence of the loom throughout Jonathan Swift’s writing. One of Swift’s more charming references occurs in the third chapter of Gulliver’s Travels, when Gulliver encounters spiders that will, if successful, produce threads whose color and gauge will be determined by their diet. But, as Mann writes, to Swift ‘the most innocent ideas can incur terrible costs’ (p. 65). Through their quality of programmability, the innocuous spiders resemble new developments in textiles that allow weavers to be replaced by ‘a sewn-together chain of hole-punched pasteboard cards’, thus unraveling one of Ireland’s prominent industries (p. 66). One of the more compelling aspects of this chapter is its emphasis upon the origin of these designs, where many of the most impactful changes sprang not from laborers, but from scientists. Readers of technical design will be no less intrigued by Deven Parker’s vivid account of optical telegraphs. Parker offers a rather thrilling overview of the cultural melodrama enfolding the rise of the semaphore, and how that novel form of rapid communication enlivened hopes and anxieties concerning Britain’s national identity and technological prominence. Parker’s chapter seamlessly weaves together fragments of poetry, editorial cartoons, engineering designs, and secret languages with her analysis of Maria Edgeworth’s ‘Lame Jervis’ to show how fiction as much as design served as a key tool in Britain’s attempt at technological supremacy.

Conclusion

The books under discussion in this review demonstrate the diversity and vitality of the scholarly work being done in the field of science, medicine, and technology studies. The authors of these works demonstrate the importance of true interdisciplinarity to the field. These works range fluidly across the study of literature, history, material and visual culture, print history, queer theory, environmental studies, legal studies, political science, and beyond. As such, these titles will be of interest to a wide variety of scholars and could fit comfortably on various syllabi. In addition, the breadth of the archive addressed—from modernist novels to Augustan poetry, from colonial scientific tracts to the choreography of modern dance—points to the widening purchase of science, medicine, and technology studies. Finally, the methodological innovation and creativity demonstrated by the authors under consideration chart exciting new directions for not only what we read, but how and why we do so.

Books Reviewed