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REVIEWS 261 pity, and was regarded as an illustration of the ephemeral nature of man and his institutions. The Persian was seen as an example of the cruelty of human nature. Persia evoked the melancholy of ruins and of decline; and yet, the antiquity of its civilization nourished confidence in the permanence of the human spirit. Throughout the century, Frenchmen felt towards Persia a mixture of revulsion and attraction. It satisfied their taste for the fantastic and for the macabre, their need for an escape, their fascination with the unknown and the mysterious . They were mesmerized by Persian flowers, gardens, opium, and luxury items. The manifold attitudes towards Persia were the expression of the multiple facets of European sensitivity and imagination. The author makes it clear that the interpretation of oriental themes in literature must take into account the complexity, the confusion, and the rich texture of the Persian myth. The selected bibliography includes a useful chronological listing of travel literature for the period from 1558 to 1799. The main lesson one draws from Bonnerot's exploration into the vagaries of the collective imagination is the subjectivity with which civilizations confront each other at different periods of their development. The heroine of the book is Scheherazade, whose story, he observes, sings the glory of woman and proclaims the victory of knowledge over death: Dénonciation du crime et appel à la vie, l'histoire de Scheherazade est tout entière frémissante de vulnérabilité et tendue par une volonté inflexible. Dans sa longue lutte pour faire reculer les ténèbres, Scheherazade incarne l'esprit des Lumières où se mêlent courage et besoin d'appui, ingénuité et habileté, lucidité et détermination, (pp. 325-26) Pauline Kra Yeshiva University Paula R. Backscheider. Daniel Defoe: His Life. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. xv + 671pp. US$29.95. A few days ago dy'd Mr. Daniel Defoe, sen. a person well known for his numerous and various writings. He had a great natural genius; and understood very well the trade and interest of this Kingdom ... he was in the interest of civil and religious liberty, in behalf of which he appeared on several remarkable occasions, (quoted on p. 530) Pinning Defoe down in a few words is not easy, but, towards the end of her biography, Paula Backscheider seems to agree with the emphasis of this obituary from the Grub Street Journal. Defoe was of course a man of many parts and many disguises, but he certainly had a great natural genius and his driving passions were the economic prosperity of his country, his religion, and his 262 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 2:3 conviction that every person was bom with inalienable rights. These are admirable qualities and it is clear that Backscheider admires her subject, giving him the benefit of the doubt on several occasions, such as in a well-balanced discussion of Defoe's ambiguous position during the propaganda war of the last years of Queen Anne (pp. 283-300), and generally in her assessment of Defoe's relations with his wife, a subject on which there is virtually no real evidence. Defoe is seriously criticized only for his habit of rushing into things with too little forethought and, above all, for his dishonesty in business. Defoe's complex business affairs are one area of his life which has benefited from the accumulation of new research in recent years, not least by Backscheider herself. This biography contains innumerable new bits and pieces of information on its subject, so much indeed that the author is able to eschew the wholesale looting of Defoe's works for supposed autobiographical information and insights which has been the characteristic of previous biographies. Only on a few occasions does one find unsupported attribution of emotions and thoughts to her subject, these normally being signalled by such words as "must have," "perhaps ," and "probably" (for example, pp. 6, 7, 20). One can only applaud this determination to base the biography on proper documentation, but it does inevitably mean that one gets very quickly to the 1690s with the subject in his thirties, since even new research has thrown very little light...

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