An Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Fiction: Raising the Novel by John Skinner (review)

Abstract

172 Reviews identity without nationality' is arguably about society's masks, social mobility, and true value. And the names ofthe men in Cowley's Bold Stroke are mixed up (p. 169). Anderson opens her work with a textual description of a recent cartoon, which would have been better reproduced than described?or better still, replaced by a lively caricature of the period. In an attempt to relate these plays to the present, she entertainingly associates them with the cinema subgenre of 'chick flick',listing among others Thelma and Louise and Bridget Jones' Diary, which are also concerned with female characters who 'renegotiate the popular romance plot' (p. 206). Royal College of Music Angela Escott An Introduction toEighteenth-Century Fiction: Raising theNovel. By John Skinner. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave. 2001. xi + 3i7pp. ?16.99. ISBN 0-33377625 -9. In his preface to An Introduction toEighteenth-Century Fiction, John Skinner suggests his book will be beneficial not only to those students who have not yet read their set eighteenth-century texts, but also 'to those who never will'. This is an unduly modest claim. Skinner has written a concise, intelligent, and engaging introduction for undergraduates, which should motivate all but the most uninterested to read the eighteenth-century novels that he recommends. Skinner commences with introductory chapters on the 'Canon' and 'Gender and Genre', then devotes one chapter to Richardson and Fielding respectively. The remainder of the book is devoted to chapter-length analyses of pairs of authors: Defoe and Behn, Sterne and Smollett, Lennox and Burney, and Radcliffe and Godwin. The final chapter returns to the one-author study, with an extended treatment of Austen. As well as examining the lives and writings of these eleven authors, Skinner explores the Gothic, the novel of sensibility, travel writing, the novel in letters, the picaresque, and quixotism. Skinner's approach reinforces close analysis with wide reading. In a period when many student courses stress the 'English' aspect to the fiction of the period, Skinner helpfully explains the influence of continental writers upon the English novel. He also makes frequent allusion to rarer texts, encouraging students to use online literature databases such as Chadwyck Healey to explore writers like Francis Coventry, Mary Davys, and Frances Brooke. Skinner proposes that his overall plan is to track the 'feminization of the novel', from the journalistic mode of Defoe to the free indirect discourse of Austen. This approach offers an admirable clarity, as Skinner explores the female voice or the representation of women, while also examining the novels in a general context. Yet the concluding chapter on Austen sometimes veers close to suggesting that the storyof eighteenth-century fiction is a progress towards a feminocentric 'realist' novel. There are also some contentious readings, such as the suggestion that free indirect discourse is a 'gendered stylistic marker', an inherently feminine form. Another example is his reading of Mrs Shandy's debates over whether to employ a male or female midwife for the birth of Tristram. Skinner sees the episode as an allegory for the birth of the novel, usurped from the traditional female hands of Behn and Haywood by male obstetricians such as Sterne and Richardson. This imaginative interpretation requires some qualification for readers looking foran idea to reproduce in an essay or exam. Equally controversial is Skinner's confessed aversion to exploring 'historical back? ground' such as the Jacobite rebellions or Napoleonic Wars. This is a decision presumably made on the grounds of economy, but it is difficultto escape history entirely in the discussion of eighteenth-century fiction,and terms such as 'Tory' and ' Jacobin' recur without sufficienthistorical explanation. MLR, 99.1, 2004 173 There are moments when the text is less than user-friendly. There is a surfeit of italics in the early chapters, denoting titles, unfamiliar terms, emphasis, and stages of argument alike. A glossary would have been most useful, for some theoretical words such as 'hyponimic' or 'hypernimic' occur without the careful explanation that they require, whereas some like 'extradiegetic' are not explained until their second mention. On the whole, Skinner's style is clear and energetic, and his book is, above all, highly readable. He has succeeded in escaping many of the...