Reader entrapment in eighteenth-century literature /

This collection of essays applies reader entrapment theory to a variety of 18th-century texts. After the editor sketches this criticism's principles, G. Douglas Atkins considers the possible artistic "impoverishment" of the "cool, accommodated prose of the scholarly article." K.L. Cope traces the readerly mazes of mock/imitations by Phillips and Gay. Louise K. Barnett's feminist reading of voyeurism in "Strephon and Chloe" contrasts A.B. England's view of the poem's male vision. Christopher Fox (on "Master Bates," not expressly on entrapment), F.N. Smith, and J.R. Clark explore the "Swiftian swindle" in Gulliver's Travels. Anthony Kaufman sees a significant contrast between characters' views in some Restoration plays and their epilogues; James Thomson believes Wycherley's last plays are "peopled. . .with no one whom the audience can approve." The "entrapment" William Burling finds in plays does not convince. J.P. Zomchick believes the reader of Roderick Random is "emplotted as a bourgeois, gendered subject", and M.A. Rabb shows Fielding creates in Voyage to Lisbon generic confusions about travelling and destinations, writing and living. Kropf's collection allows any level of reader to test the effectiveness of entrapment theory. Notes. B. E. McCarthy; College of the Holy Cross