The eighteenth-century review journal as allegory: Smollett’s Critical Review and the work of criticism

Jones, Richard J. (2019). The eighteenth-century review journal as allegory: Smollett’s Critical Review and the work of criticism. The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 60(1) pp. 45–63.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/ecy.2019.0004

Abstract

One way to read an eighteenth-century review journal would be for the critical judgments that it contains. This essay argues, instead, that it should be read as allegory. The essay focuses on the Critical Review, established by Tobias Smollett in 1756, with the (impossible) aim to review everything, and explores how it appears both as what it is and in what it is not. Placed alongside Smollett’s other works of instalment and translation, what is disclosed by the Critical Review is a new work: the work of criticism itself.

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