Eighteenth-Century Fiction & the Reinvention of Wonder by Sarah Tindal Kareem (review)

Abstract

KAREEM, SARAH TINDAL. Eighteenth-Century Fiction & Reinvention of Wonder. Oxford University Press, 2014. 288 pp. $99.00 hardback. Sarah Tindal Kareem's engaging book illustrates how wonder not only survives across both realist and non-novelistic fiction of eighteenth century but in fact comes to structure these texts and phenomenology of reading them. Across her book, and explicitly in first chapter, Kareem shows how fiction, on one hand, and early-century empiricism, Protestant doctrine, and later-century skeptical philosophy, on other, all strive to create wonder about everyday by making familiar strange. This defamiliarizing perspective exists across discourses as kind of unifying grid that connects Enlightenment philosophy and fiction in substantive ways. Indeed, central to her argument is that fiction cultivates wonder at real in manner consistent with Hume's critique of induction (4). In soliciting wonder, authors employ parallel strategies to make readers simultaneously doubt truth status of representation and marvel at ordinary, thereby combating both the automatization of perception and the automatization of belief (55). Kareem lines up her argument against dominant accounts of novel--e.g., those of Aravamudan, Davis, McKeon, Moretti, and Watt--as well as current work on aesthetics of wonder and defamiliarization. Though drawing from familiar gene pool (spiritual autobiography, naive empiricism, travel writing, everyday), she isolates persistent drive towards wondering at and about world that is central to fiction's success, while she also uses concept of wonder to draw out connections between diverse range of texts (breaking down dichotomy between realism and marvelous [28]). Importantly, Kareem counters standard truism that novelists dramatize various philosophical ideas of their respective eras by showing how late-century skepticism is in fact informed by literary developments of eighteenth century. She also challenges notion that aesthetics of defamiliarization is product of Romantic era, arguing instead that earlier eighteenth-century writers recognized value of an estranged perspective. The first chapter, Wonder in Age of Enlightenment, offers deep analysis of how concepts of wonder evolve across century (drawing on such sources as Addison, Johnson, Karnes, Hume, and Smith), while also showing how wonder functions both within texts and outside of them as hermeneutic mode. The second chapter, probably meatiest and most exciting for scholars of novel, reads in tandem Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature to demonstrate how both authors manipulate spiritual autobiography to create wonder in everyday and, specifically, to reveal life's contingency; epistemological indeterminacy that their narrators face leads to a provisional belief in which one assents while recognizing illusoriness of that to which one assents, which in turn creates paradigm for assent that fiction itself solicits (77). Moving from fiction that insists on its historicity to Tom Jones and The Castle of Otranto, Kareem structures her third chapter around pressing question: How and why do fictions become self-disclosing and what role does wonder play in this development? (109). Instead of soliciting wonder at strange content, these texts invite readers to wonder at plot and design. …