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MICHAEL AUSTIN. New Testaments: Cognition, Closure, and the Figural Logic of the Sequel, 1660-1740. Newark: Delaware, 2012. Pp. xv 1 161. $70.
Mr. Austin's elegant study of the literary works and their sequels produced in England in the eighty-year span from the publication of Milton's Paradise Lost to that of Richardson's Pamela is grounded in two pertinent observations, one more compelling than the other. The first, and the less exciting, has to do with the structure of the human brain, the countervailing compulsions that drive it to both long for and to resist closure as well as its creative capacity for reconciling contradictions that would otherwise create painful "cognitive dissonance." The second, and far more powerful, observation is that for the period he considers, the Christian Bible, comprising two intimately related, but fundamentally different, testaments to the shape and significance of the human encounter with the divine, provides the deep narrative structure and the figural logic for the period's publication of narrative sequels-and, indeed, for the period's nonliterary readings of the world.
The cognitive drive toward both concluding and continuing stories, toward closure and open-endedness, is far too evident to dismiss. Mr. Austin justifiably draws our attention to his being within his scholarly rights to invoke personal, popular, and scientific evidence. After all, for emotional, social, and evolutionary reasons, we are never truly through thinking about the things that move us and matter to us as the phenomenon of the sequel demonstrates.
That said, the distinct virtue of Mr. Austin's study lies less in his observations about such perennial desire than in his figural readings of the works he features in this book and in his explanations of the logic that drives, infuses, and emerges from them and their sequels, Paradise Lost, Pilgrim's Progress, and Robinson Crusoe, especially. Here, his study is groundbreaking. Mr. Austin's interest in the reading of the texts is in their specific contributions to their situations and times. And by this finely tuned focus, he radically changes our sense of the literary world he describes.
He begins his study with "God's Sequel," that is, the New Testament. This collection of disparate...