The wild man and noble savage are familiar figures in eighteenth-century literature and philosophy; it is to Richard Nash's great credit that he makes them strange again, restoring them to their often contradictory and always fascinating eighteenth-century contexts. Wild Enlightenment reminds us that these figures were real beings in the eighteenth century and places fictional characters such as Robinson Crusoe's Friday and Gulliver's Travels’ Yahoos in a real world defined by the wild boy Peter, the royal dwarf Christian Ulrich Jorry, the spectacle of the fair booth, and the scientific debates concerning the species classification of the ape, pygmy, and man. Referencing an often-dazzling array of high and low sources, Wild Enlightenment recovers the not-quite-humans that forced Enlightenment thinkers to question their own humanity.

One of Wild Enlightenment's most important contributions to eighteenth-century studies is its complication of the dichotomies that would seem to underlie such a project; most notably, its rejection of a simple “civilized/wild” binarism is extended to question current understandings of Habermas's well-known “public/private” spheres. In order to locate the subject positions lying between monster and man, Nash interweaves the contrasting terms of the “social/solitary” and “passionate/rational” man and charts the resulting four categories: the social/passionate man represented by the ape or native, the social/rational man represented by the court member or scientist, the solitary/passionate man represented by the wild youth, and the solitary/rational man represented by the castaway or exile. These four categories organize his book chapters, and, in each chapter, Nash demonstrates that aspects of the Enlightenment citizen is mirrored in wild “others” that offer extreme constructions of the public and private. As Nash explains, “The wild man is not safely ‘other’ than the citizen—but is instead one of those troubling, necessary hybrids in part constitutive of an emergent public sphere—[that] has required us to shuffle back and forth between high and low culture, bourgeois and plebian spaces, the savage and the civilized” (101).

Nash's “shuffling back and forth” allows him to bring new cultural materials to canonical texts including Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, and Frankenstein, and authors such as Alexander Pope and Dr. John Arbuthnot, Jonathan Swift, and Samuel Johnson and James Boswell. The result is a series of exciting readings that uncover clearly delineated confrontations between representatives of the wild and civilized, which recast a text's larger concerns. For example, Nash's exploration of Johnson's trip to Scotland focuses on his meetings with James Burdell, Lord Monboddo, a philosopher who believes that orangutans could be taught to speak and that their organized group living represents human's own earlier civil society. Johnson presents himself as a “civilized man put into the wild, surrounded by tribes who speak only a barbaric tongue,” but his debates with Monboddo reveal an ambivalence in this position, an ambivalence that allows Johnson to both sympathize with the Highlander's loyalty to the Pretender and reject MacPherson's nationalist claims for Ossian (149). Similarly, in his chapter on Gulliver's Travels, Nash focuses on Gulliver's conflicted position as both civilized and wild in his relationship to the Yahoos. Gulliver believes the Yahoos to be the quasi-humans that appear in contemporary debates concerning the species identification of primates. When Gullliver is placed in the category of Yahoo, he must confront this practice of categorizing humans by species, nationality, and culture; as Nash explains, the species debates highlight “the troubling question of the fourth voyage: to what extent is our conception of human identity natural, and to what extent is it cultural” (115)?

In chapters such as these on Johnson and Swift, Nash uncovers the eighteenth-century's equation of language acquisition with civilization and reliance on speech as a marker of the human. Nash asserts this insight through several unexpected analyses: he explores deaf language instruction in connection with the feral child Peter and Robinson Crusoe's Friday (74–79); he examines the Houyhnhnm and Yahoo languages as referenced in letters concerning politics and opera and echoed in Pope's Iliad (116–23); and he connects debates concerning slavery to the mute ape character, Sir Oran Haut-ton (and a reappearing Lord Monboddo), in Peacock's Melincourt (176–82). Unexpected concepts—species classification and language acquisition being but two—are shown foundational to Enlightenment thinking. These concepts, in turn, allow a reassessment of the more prominent eighteenth-century debates concerning innocence/corruption, nationalism, and sociability.

One of the joys of Wild Enlightenment is its desire to bring untamed texts and their unsettling ideas into its discussions. Most notably, Nash devotes a chapter to the wild child Peter as depicted in several Scriblerian pamphlets; interrogating the attribution of It Cannot Rain but it Pours to Arbuthnot, the attribution of an image to Swift, and the marginalia of the book collector Maurice Johnson, Nash makes a case for attributing the satire to Swift. This investigatory energy characterizes Wild Enlightenment; Nash examines overlooked moments in better-known texts, such as the “Double Mistress Episode” in The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus and the character of William in Frankenstein. And, throughout the book, a wide range of cultural materials sparks new ideas. In his use of visual material, Nash is not content to rely on Hogarth; images of chimps from early scientific books are compared to images of Samuel Johnson with his walking stick, and advertisements depicting the wild child Peter are joined to his image in paintings from the King's Staircase at Kensington Palace.

At points, this concentrated juxtaposition of diverse texts can overwhelm the larger argument Nash is making. For example, when discussing Crusoe's island, we get, in two pages, references to Johnson's Dictionary, the wild child Peter, the theorist Bruno Latour, a poem by David Lewis, a poem by Defoe, William Dampier's account of Juan Fernandez Island, and scientific research done on Robinson Crusoe Island (78–79). These references culminate in an excellent explication of theories of environmental imperialism, but I had trouble connecting this to the discussions of language acquisition that follow. This rapid conflation of texts sometimes allows for a too-quick conflation of ideas. In the chapter exploring the Scriblerian pamphlets, Nash argues, “the figure of the wild man generates a satire along the axes of race and gender, while locating as a site of anxiety those social spaces—particularly the Hanoverian court—where established orders are bring called into question” (60). I would have liked race, gender, and class to have been held separate and explored more fully before being connected here. Gender, in particular, needs more sustained attention, as the authors and figures explored in Wild Enlightenment are typically male; why is the wild man a wild man? Nash himself is aware that this rapid succession of texts and ideas can lead to confusion, as when he writes, “One might well seek at this point a moment of clarity” (40) and “this chapter has been indirect, perhaps even disorienting” (100). Although he resists these moments of clarity, I would have like the final pages of each chapter, where Nash states his arguments in their clearest form, to be extended.

On these same pages, Nash terms his analysis “kaleidoscopic” (40) and “meandering” (100). This activity enlivens Wild Enlightenment and allows Nash to both access and replicate the wildness of his topic. Nash succeeds in startling us with the real beings that counter the human; he also succeeds in startling us with his brilliant reconstructions of the ideas that these figures reveal to comprise the human. Wild Enlightenment is an invigorating piece of scholarship: invigorating in its ideas, materials, and methodology.