One of the great formative events in English history, the Civil War, took place during the seventeenth century; it may or may not surprise us to find so little direct representation of its events and issues in the major creative work of the time. One of Salzman’s most valuable exhibits is The Princess Cloria by Sir Percy Herbert, a thinly disguised Civil War novel ‘embellished’, to quote its own subtitle, ‘with divers political notions, and singular remarks of modern transactions’. The ‘strange actions of the times’, in the opinion of the writer, ‘exceeded all belief’: this justified the decision to cast them into the form of a romance. The comment is striking in its attempt to identify the essence of romance in terms of wonders rather than in terms of fiction. The work as a whole provides the kind of imaginative recreation and commentary on the war that we generally miss elsewhere.

Salzman rightly concentrates on considerable but lesser-known works, a tendency that seems to grow stronger as the book progresses. The obligatory tramp across the exhausted fields of Elizabethan minor fiction appears to have been something of an effort; the author cheers up noticeably when he reaches fresher pastures in the decades that follow. Of the later works, he gives more attention to Bunyan’s Holy War than to the Pilgrim’s Progress, and also gives careful and appreciative treatment to some minor novels of crime and amorous intrigue. He commends John Dunton, too, for his Shandean Voyage Round the World, whose hero not only takes some time to get born but also fails, despite the promise of the book’s title, to travel any further than Buckinghamshire.

At the end of his book, Salzman turns to confront the post-structuralist challenge to literary history. One wonders if he needed to bother. His knowing but unobtrusive references to framing devices and self-conscious fiction begin much earlier: there is no temptation to regard him as a theoretical ingenu. Even Todorov and Derrida have admitted (grudgingly) that there may still be a place for traditional approaches: Salzman’s book, a modest but discerning piece of cultural history with a strong leavening of critical evaluation, helps to prove the point. Occasionally, we may suspect, Salzman nods: is Erycius Puteanus a real author, as is suggested on page 329, or merely a Rabelaisian invention? Is there an unnoticed significance in the name of the eponymous heroine of Richard Blackbourn’s Clitie (1688)? But on the whole this is a well-researched and useful book. Governing, as it does, a period of a century and a half, it is an important achievement: Salzman has read, absorbed, and summarized a great many works, both within and outside the bounds of his chosen genre and period. His work will be chiefly useful to specialists, but they at least will be grateful.