Sinister Aesthetics: The Appeal of Evil in Early Modern English Literature. Joel Elliot Slotkin. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. xii + 290 pp. $109.99.
and Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West, Part I are major exceptions. Dyani Johns Taff’s interesting if not always coherent essay does compare Margaret Cavendish’s early novel Blazing World to Shakespeare’s Pericles, establishing the dependence of their protagonists’ action on “the stage as sea, sea as stage” (282). But why no articles on Cavendish’s picaresque “Assaulted and Pursued Chastity” or Wroth’s Urania? The only thing unclear in this valuable collection is why the literary half is restricted to drama—and plays by men (an article on Aphra Behn’s The Widow Ranter could have provided further insight from a female playwright). Notable examples of penetrating vision and ingenious approach to elusive phenomena in part 2 include Laura Aydelotte’s “Mapping Women: Place Names and a Woman’s Place,” Stephanie Chamberlain’s “Eroticizing Women’s Travel: Desdemona and the Desire for Adventure in Othello” (one of three essays focused on Desdemona, who emerges a more complex character than usual), and Suzanne Tartamella’s surprising “Traveling Companions: Shakespeare’s As You Like It and the Book of Ruth.” I wish I had room to extol the excellence of most chapters in part 2 and the collection as a whole. Even the few less successful pieces contain wonderful perceptions and are (like all but one or two) substantially responsive to other essays in the volume, enriching the collective pictures formed by the groupings of texts or travelers. Mary Fuller’s afterword is a brilliant stroke of editorial care for the volume’s contribution as a whole. Just as we start to hunger for meta-critical attention to the issue of the starved archive and the male-dominated literary canon, we hear from a scholar who combines, with a rare talent for both, fine training in literary and theoretical studies and wide experience in historiography. Her essay makes clear the paucity of resources, while providing a useful model for making the best possible use of what we have—even those of us with less ease of access to large research collections. More work needs to be done in the field staked out by this carefully crafted collection, and with the stimulating models it offers, and Fuller’s attention to the process, it will be done.