campaigns, on behalf of the New Historicism, against what he calls traditional literary history. His tone is fervent and adversarial, as if it were morally imperative for the reader to adopt his critical perspectives. Since something very important seems to be at stake, the reader would like Hunter to provide a theoretical statement of the issues that divide old and new literary history, but instead the reader has to deduce it. What emerges in Hunter's book as the New Historicism is the project of placing literary works in their historical context in an engagé politically progressivist way. Texts are to be read as scenes of social conflict and the New Historicist critic is to advocate the progressive side." Margaret Anne Doody, writing in the South Atlantic Review, observed that "[t]he strength of Before Novels lies in its treatment of what is usually offered merely as "background" to studies of the novel in general or to the study of particular novels. There is nothing here of much interest on any one novel or novelist. Despite Hunter's initial claim to have read numbers of the novels of the period, he does not offer us many examples aside from the best-known works of major authors. We get references to Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Tom Jones, Clarissa—but little real reference to or quotations from other fictional works by other writers." Jeffrey Smitten, discussing the book in The Review of English Studies, stated that "there is little question that Hunter has written a superb book—one that will exert a major impact on the study of the origins of the novel and of eighteenth-century literature generally. He has effected a Copernican revolution by shifting the centre of energy in the period from the conservative tradition of Dryden, Swift, and Pope to the inventive, dynamic, and ultimately one consisting of figures that the Augustans feared and loathed—the likes of Dunton, Cibber, Manly, and Defoe. We are in many ways more the descendants of the latter tradition than the former, and Hunter's excellent book enables us to move beyond the traditional canon to begin to explore the implications of a parentage that has been too easily denied." Frank McConnell, reviewing Before Novels alongside Alvin Kernan's The Death of Literature in The Wilson Quarterly, wrote that "Hunter's depiction of the newly enfranchised 18th-century audiences would not make a bad description of the novelty-mad, tradition-ignoring, postmodern television mutants whom Kernan