Book Reviews 177 "doubleness" reach an apotheosis in Dryden's "late aesthetic," the subject of the book's concluding chapter. According to Augustine, The Hind and the Panther is not an (ill-timed) act of political opportunism but a trenchant investigation of the limits of language, in which the "Holy Writ" and the "whole empire of signs" is "put on trial"; the same "systematic decentring of language and authority" is at work in Don Sebastian, a text that exposes the "groundlessness and

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... ss of political legitimation." More than simply a strategy of self-preservation-though it is this too-Dryden's late aesthetic is an expression of the author's "painfully acquired scepticism," his view of the "script of history as palimpsest, an accumulation of traces without any validating ground." Augustine's campaign for a less teleological understanding of seventeenth-century literature may appear to be a tilting at windmills (an expression linked to another seventeenth-century text we associate with the birth of modernity). His own detailed study of how partisan accounts can harden into received wisdom shows that it is easier to reverse the polarities of the dominant narrative than to dispense with the narrative altogether. Nor is it likely that eighteenth-centuryists will suddenly stop thinking their period begins in the spring of 1660. But Augustine ultimately has no illusions about this: "Literary periods are not going anywhere, he admits." Still, however the history is sliced, this book offers meticulous readings of five authors who did not presume to know how things would turn out.