British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, 1740-1830 , and: Women Writers and the English Nation in the 1790s , and: Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS229 edition ofMansfield Park, is based on a concept of "textual primitivism," presumably the opposite of textual urbanity as well as what Sutherland calls "familial correction" (p. xxxiii). The result in Keymer-Wakeley is a critical edition with attitude, amply supported by scholarship but wearing its professional obligations fully alert to the fact that the editing process nowadays cannot be a dull duty (and certainly not a silent activity) but should be the literary version of a Wagnerian opera, an opus which contains aspects of all other genres and requires all the creative literary skills. Not only that: modern editing drags along with it some of the most fascinating mediations between printing technology and authorial intention, the muse and the marketplace, logic and intuition, artistic purpose and commercial practicality , the writerly and the readerly. No less than one should expect, of course, from a master printer who manufactured something that turned out to be a founding text in the history of the modern novel and whose industrial and social aspirations were directly linked to his scribal power. Clive Probyn Monash University Miranda Burgess. British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, 1740-1830. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xii + 307pp. US$59.95. ISBN 0-521-77329-6. Angela Keane. Women Writers and theEnglish Nation in the 1 790s. Cambridge and NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ix + 200pp. US$54.95. ISBN 0-521-77342-3. Adriana Craciun and Kari E. Lokke, eds. Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. xiii + 395pp. US$20.95. ISBN 0-7914-4970-X. The Romantic period is not what it used to be. An easy confidence in the centrality ofpoetry and of the particular people who wrote it, in the boundaries between the words Enlightenment and Romanticism and all that they implied, and in the definition ofliterature itself, has given way to an increasingly sophisticated historical sense of the period's cultural heterogeneity. This revisionary momentum has focused our attention on the important links between the effects of the ubiquitous use of a gendered vocabulary as a means of comprehending broad social change, the actual conditions of particular men and women, concerns about property and the instabilities of commerce, and the multiple forms of literary production in the age. 230EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION14:2 The French Revolution remains central to these debates, but it no longer constitutes the historical bedrock that it once did. The result is a new critical landscape that often asks different questions about a different—but increasingly familiar—group of writers, and which has weakened the temporal boundaries that traditionally defined the Romantic period. In doing so, it has begun to make the period's most familiar writers and literary themes interesting in important new ways. Miranda Burgess's British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, 17401830 tackles many of these challenges by foregrounding the issue of genre, exploring the changing ways that romance was bound up with debates about political economy. Taking up Anna Barbauld's dictum, "Let me make the novels of a country, and let who will make the systems," Burgess argues that as a genre integrating public and private levels ofexperience, romance offered an important means of commenting on emerging models of social order that were grounded in psychology rather than theology. In doing so, she suggests, romance filled a crucial ideological vacuum. Arguments stressing the divine right of kings may have gone the way of the Stuarts, butJohn Locke's liberal alternative was itself grounded in a Genesis-based account of the divine right of husbands and fathers that was destabilized by the interventions of Tory women writers such as Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood. If, as Burgess argues, these older narratives of social order were experiencing something ofa legitimation crisis thatwas compounded by theJacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745, the problem could be solved by embracing a new narrative articulated by thinkers such as David Hume and Adam Smith, which celebrated a morally progressive British society in which the sovereignty of virtuous sentiment was ensured through the circulating effects of sympathy. Such a vision, with its emphasis on human nature...