4E Cognition and Eighteenth-Century Fiction: How the Novel Found Its Feet by Karin Kukkonen

Abstract

Reviewed by: 4E Cognition and Eighteenth-Century Fiction: How the Novel Found Its Feet by Karin Kukkonen Jun Feng Karin Kukkonen, 4E Cognition and Eighteenth-Century Fiction: How the Novel Found Its Feet (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2019). Pp. 272; 3 halftones. $105.00 cloth. The eighteenth century is a key period in the evolution of the modern European novel, during which it established itself and worked out its key stylistic and narrative traits. In 4E Cognition and Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Karin Kukkonen approaches the question of "how the novel found its feet" in the eighteenth century from the 4E perspective—that is, approaches to cognitive processes that understand them not as purely mental but also as embodied, embedded, extended, and enacted: Thought and feeling are both integral in this account, and profoundly embodied in physical states, movements, gestures, etc. Such cognition is also embedded in social and material contexts. Some proponents even argue that the human mind is extended into the material environment, for example, when we read or write. Indeed, others go further still and suggest that our very perception is enactive and depends on our bodies' movement in a particular environment.2 The book, a judicious exploration into the literary style and narrative strategies of the eighteenth-century novel, offers case studies of four eighteenth-century novelists—Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Lennox, Sarah Fielding, and Frances Burney. The punning subtitle hints at the author's central argument that the novel "found its feet" by "finding its bodies" (2): that is, that eighteenth-century novels developed a new way to configure the embodied dimension of written language, an innovation that engaged readers' minds and bodies and made the novel a prominent cultural technology. Kukkonen considers the perception of eighteenth-century novels as a kind of preparation for the nineteenth-century novel of realism, a view that defines, and values the eighteenth-century novel in relation to what comes after it. This phenomenon, which Kukkonen terms "the curse of realism," assured both the exclusion of eighteenth-century novelists like Eliza Haywood and Charlotte Lennox from "the rise of the novel" and the perception of their fictions as anomalies in the development of the novel form (2). Kukkonen attempts to reevaluate the eighteenth-century novel's contribution to the historical development of modern novels with assumptions from 4E cognition. The overall argument of the book is that the eighteenth-century novel developed a broad repertoire of embodied language that both shaped the practice of reading and assured the novel a place in emergent worlds of entertainment and book learning. Kukkonen notes that although some of the strategies pioneered by the four eighteenth-century novelists that she studies were taken up by the nineteenth-century writers, this adaptation of formal elements from the eighteenth century has nothing to do with realism. The book makes this argument by describing the four writers' configuration of embodied language and cognition and by presenting this configuration as a "lifeworld technology" (2). The first eighteenth-century novelist examined by Kukkonen is Eliza Haywood, whose techniques to evoke the embodied experience of her readers are the focus of Chapter 2. Kukkonen argues that embodied engagement in Haywood's [End Page 128] works does not depend on simple simulation but rather on Haywood's precise management of embodied language and joint attention. The chapter makes use of Michael Tomasello's model of shared intentionality in human communication as it tracks Haywood's strategic use of embodied language, integrating internal, external, and culturally modeled dimensions of embodiment. Kukkonen's attention to Haywood's strategic use of embodied language also includes attention to Epistles for the Ladies (1749–1750), the narrative strategies of which track the mediation of embodied engagement through letters, embedded narratives, and theatrical scenes. In Chapter 3, devoted to Charlotte Lennox, Kukkonen finds a source for Lennox's establishment of diverse repertoires of embodiment in her novels and translations from the French in the language of embodiment developed by Haywood and others. The chapter presents Lennox's immersive mode of narration as a means of combining external and internal perceptions of bodily states, a mode specific to Lennox. Lennox's repertoires of embodiment undergird her development of...