Finance, Fiction, and Loss

Reviewed by: Men of Feeling in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Touching Fiction by Alex Wetmore Amelia Dale Alex Wetmore, Men of Feeling in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Touching Fiction (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2013). Pp. 207. $95.00. Eighteenth-century printed texts are notoriously self-aware about the circumstances of their production and dissemination. The relationship between self-reflexivity and literary form has been explored by such figures as Christina Lupton, Deidre Lynch, Christopher Flint, and Tom Keymer, among others. Alex Wetmore argues for the congruity between the printed bodies of sentimental books and the mechanized men of feeling presented within their pages. Sentimentalism’s stress on embodied emotive expression is crucially related to the eighteenth century’s [End Page 547] preoccupation with the physicality of the book; print’s palpability becomes crucial to its capacity to elicit emotion. The subtitle, Touching Fiction, refers to how sentimental fictions deploy tactility in order to become emotionally and allegorically “touching.” The cover illustration, an anonymous etching with engraving titled “High life at noon” (1769), portrays a man touching a woman’s breast amidst a scene of literary and appetitive consumption. It suggests another, more sexual connotation of “touching fiction.” Yet Wetmore’s interest is not so much in the sexual practices of the men of feeling, but in the way feeling is inscribed on sensible bodies, and what it means to touch, and be touched by, sentimental fiction. What I found especially interesting was the study of sentimentalism’s “touching” of bodies via book-like bodies and bodies in books. This speaks to one of the most fascinating aspects of eighteenth-century writing: its playful coalescence of signifying flesh and printed paper. Sentimental novels by Henry Brooke, Laurence Sterne, Tobias Smollett, and Henry Mackenzie are the focus of Men of Feeling. Wetmore introduces a useful term, “corporeal defamiliarization,” to denote how sentimental novels denaturalize their status as touchable book-objects. The phrase also encompasses sentimentalism’s preoccupation with bodies of texts, and bodies in texts. Wetmore compellingly argues that sentimental self-consciousness can be understood to have the matter of the book and the body at its fraught center. Sentimental self-reflexivity, therefore, is not the metafictional, proto-postmodern irony that our moment in history might tempt us to identify it as being. The book is structured around three lengthy chapters, each with a title composed of two competing, interrelating terms. In the first of these sections, “Body/Language,” Wetmore explores the relationship between sentimental self-reflexivity and eighteenth-century theories of language. Though sentimental fiction, as is often noted, draws attention to the limitations of writing and speech in favor of an embodied articulation of emotion, it is far from naïve in its treatment of bodily expression. It remains alert to the way bodily signs mirror lexical and linguistic structures. Wetmore’s argument is convincing, particularly when considering how in Tristram Shandy the language of the body is as fraught, and as susceptible to failure and miscommunication, as the words that the characters speak and write. Arguing from a different perspective in “Tristram Shandy and the Wound of Language” (1995), Ross King contends that the impotent, ailing male bodies in the novel are constitutive to the failure of language that pervades the book. In a narrative that entangles literary expression with sexual prowess, linguistic failure and sexual impotence become inextricable. Sentimental fiction might privilege embodied expression, but it is as skeptical about interpreting the body as it is about reading the page. In the subsequent section, “Feeling/Machines,” Wetmore argues that the automaton is central to sentimental fiction’s self-awareness. The feeling body of the sentimental man, marked by print and experience, becomes analogous to the mechanically reproduced book. Wetmore notes how ideal, sentimental, masculine virtue is repeatedly characterized as involving mechanized, automatic affective responses. The following section, “Public/Health,” investigates relationships between sentimental novels’ preoccupation with their own physicality, and books of “physick.” Wetmore suggests that sentimental fiction’s corporeal defamiliarization works in tandem with the genre’s palliative goal of expanding and extending nervous sensibilities. Following Henry Fielding in The Author’s Farce (1730), Wetmore [End Page 548] plays on the suggestive congruities between hacks and quacks. Sentimentalism’s fraught...

Why are scenes of storytelling so central to sentimental fiction in late eighteenth-century Britain? Shifts in narrative level, where a character tells their story—most often of tragic loss—to another character, are as familiar to readers of sentimental fiction as the tears its heroes and heroines shed. This essay analyzes the typical structure of embedding in a range of sentimental novels, including Man of Feeling, David Simple, History of Emily Montague, and Millenium Hall, in order to show how narrative exchanges most often involve the exchange of money and moral feeling. The “narrative of a narrative” that embedded stories tell concerns the historical tensions between virtue and commerce at a nascent moment in the history of capitalism and scenes of storytelling work to manage capitalism’s foundational contradiction between use value and exchange value. The essay ultimately demonstrates how stories-within-stories in sentimental novels are, themselves, embedded within capitalism’s system of exchange.

Personal Effects and Sentimental Fictions Deidre Lynch Sentimental novels are cluttered with things. The emotional attachments that people form with possessions in these mid-eighteenth-century fictions can seem as freighted with consequence as the emotional attachments that people form with each other. Indeed, modem readers of Henry Brooke's The Fool ofQuality or Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey might be pardoned for finding it hard to distinguish one sort of relationship from the other—even if normal notions of the folly of fetishism predispose us to believe that the difference between, say, ownership and friendship is a difference worth preserving. The keepsakes that clutter sentimental fiction (the lockets that protagonists wear next to their hearts; the sleeve buttons or snuffboxes that pairs of characters exchange to memorialize their first meeting or last, teary-eyed parting) work instead to collapse that difference. While they instructed their readers in emotional responsiveness, sentimentalists were more than ready to make objects of this variety—objects particularly valued because they are the surrogates for particular persons—their props. This practice marks the novelists' fashion-consciousness. On the testimony of the OED, which dates the word keepsake to 1790, it was only in the eighteenth century that keepsakes came to be identified as a distinct kind of material good. The fact that by 1790 members ofthe propertied classes had learned to want to give and to receive keepsakes from one another bespeaks the reciprocal influence EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 12, Number 2-3, January-April 2000 346 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION between eighteenth-century people's love affair with feelings, and their fascination with the new opportunities for acquisitiveness that they discovered in shops. And that new readiness to countenance superfluous expenditure that historians of this century's "consumer revolution" have recognized— people's new willingness to disregard the traditional association between luxury and vice and instead value the luxury good as a vehicle for the finer feelings—also lies behind the marketability throughout the era of a literature designed to procure for its readers the "luxury of tears."1 Writers such as Henry Brooke, Laurence Steme, Henry Mackenzie, and Sarah Scott vindicated the psychology of refinement suitable to the new consumer culture not only by finding increasingly nuanced ways of discriminating human emotions, but also by exemplifying the diversity of the portable properties that humans might feel emotional with or about. Hence the clutter. Sensibility is both the capacity to feel as others do and, as one eighteenth-century definition maintains, that "peculiar ... habitude of mind, which disposes a man to be easily moved, and powerfully affected by surrounding objects."2 The (only semi-) satiric imitator of Sterne who takes a "Sentimental Journey from Islington to Waterloo Bridge" knows he should let nothing (no thing) "escape" him: "The traveller ... should extract reflections out of a cabbage stump." Satirists were quick to note that sentimentalism invited people to be (in the standard phrase) "tremblingly alive" to dead matter.3 Such satires of sentimental animism had a point. A carriage for hire that sits alone and "unpitied" in an inn yard in Calais is able to arouse in Sterne's Parson Yorick the sense ofobligation he had been unable to muster in his earlier encounter with the Franciscan friar. "Much indeed was not to be said for it—but something might—and when a few words will rescue misery out of her distress, I hate the man who can be a churl of them."4 It seems apt that Yorick's piteous words acknowledge his obligation to a désobligeant—that they personify a carriage that seats one person only. It is as if the communicative and emotive powers that sentimentalism 1 On sensibility and consumer culture see G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture ofSensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 2 "Question: Ought Sensibility to be Cherished or Repressed?" Monthly Magazine 2 (October 1796), quoted in Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 5. 3 Thomas Hood, "A Sentimental Journey from Islington to Waterloo Bridge," first published in the London Magazine, 1821; reprinted in Sterne...

<i>The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England</i>. Edited by Mark Blackwell . Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007. Pp. 365.

<i>The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Thought</i> , ed. Frans De Bruyn

The Political Novel and the Seduction Plot: Thomas Holcroft's Anna St. Ives Katherine Binhammer Spurred by the July 1989 bicentenary of the French Revolution, critics of English literature have turned in large numbers to the study of fiction from the 1790s.1 The genealogy of the recent critical attention to 1790s fiction can be traced, in part, to our current 1990s interest in the way political meaning functions in the literary text. The impact of new historicism and cultural studies on literary criticism has led scholars to reconsider the interconnection between literature and politics, and the 1790s provide fertile ground for this work. The explicitly feminist novels ofMary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, and Charlotte Smith, for example, seem pregnant with material for those of us engaged in studying the dissemination of political and gender ideologies through literature.2 Why is it, then, that 1 Recent essay collections dedicated to issues of representation in the 1790s include Reflections on Revolution: Images ofRomanticism, ed. Alison Yarrington and Kelvin Everest (London: Routledge, 1993); Revolution in Writing: British Literary Responses to the French Revolution, ed. Kelvin Everest (Milton Keynes and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1991); Revolution and English Romanticism, ed. Keith Hanley and Raman Seiden (New York: StMartin's Press, 1990); The French Revolution andBritish Culture, ed. Ceri Crossley and Ian Small (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); and The Novels ofthe 1790s, ed. Linda Lang-Peralta (forthcoming). 2 For a sampling of this recent feminist criticism see Mary Favret, Romantic Correspondence: Women , Politics and the Fiction ofLetters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Claudia L. Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1995); Gary Kelly, Women, Writing, Revolution: 1790-1827 (Oxford: ClarenEIGHTEENTH -CENTURY FICTION, Volume 11, Number 2, January 1999 206 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Thomas Holcroft's feminist novel, Anna St. Ives (1792), has been marginalized by some and wholly ignored by other critics participating in the revisioning of 1790s fiction?3 Is it because the women writers from this period, in their combination of the textual and the personal, are too seductive to resist? Is it the problematic issue of men in feminism that keeps critics away? Or is the overtdidacticism ofHolcroft's novel responsible for its lack of popularity? In this essay, I will advance the case for the importance ofAnna St. Ives to a feminist literary history of the novel at the end of the eighteenth century. My argument is not grounded in a qualitativejudgment ofthe text's canonical greatness; rather, I am suggesting thatAnna St. Ives, as arguably the first Jacobin novel, can teach us a lot about how politics and the novel became inextricably linked through the seduction plot in the revolutionary decade.4 In herexcellentbookEquivocalBeings: Politics, Gender, andSentimentality in the 1 790s (1995), Claudia Johnson analyses the profound interplay between sentimental fiction and political debates in the decade. She argues that sentimental discourse merged with the language of politics—for example, in Burke's Reflections—such that the language of the heart and the narratives of sentimental fiction were invested with either a revolutionary or counter-revolutionary meaning. The frequent analogies appearing both in the fiction and the political tracts which linked the state of the nation to the state of the family explicitly underscore the imbrication of politics and sentimental affective relations.5 As Johnson succinctly points out, "During the 1790s ... sentimentality is politics made intimate."6 Sentimental fiction played out the revolutionary debates in the arena of the don Press, 1993); Eleanor Ty, The Unsex'd Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); and Nicola Watson, Revolution and the Form ofthe British Novel, 1790-1825 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). 3 Anna St. Ives is included in the major early studies of the 1790s political novel—for example, Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War ofIdeas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) and Gary Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel: 1780-1805 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976). But few contemporary critics, particularly feminist critics, show any interest in, or familiarity with, the text. 4 In her classic study, The Popular Novel in England (London: Constable, 1932), J.M.S. Tompkins designates Anna St. Ives "the first full-blown...

It is among the paradoxes of the lachrymose fiction that bedewed the eyes of novel readers in the later eighteenth century that the foremost exponents of the sentimental mode were also its most cogent detractors. The prime example is Henry Mackenzie, whose much-reprinted The Man of Feeling (1771), with its successors The Man of the World (1773) and Julia de Roubigne (1777), made him the most fashionable novelist of his day. With its trembling alertness to the minutiae of suffering and sympathy, and the plaintive silences of its fractured narrative form, The Man of Feeling is the exemplary sentimental text. Yet Mackenzie was to retire from novel writing in his early thirties, and in an essay of 1785 he gave systematic development to anxieties about sentimental fiction and its ethical basis that had already quietly haunted his three novels. Surveying the emergent subgenres of fiction, he detects in ‘that species called the Sentimental ’ a dangerous subversion of its central claim: that by engaging readers' sympathies with misfortune, it could activate, as well as merely represent, ‘the most exalted benevolence’. Feeling had become an end in itself, narcissistically attentive to nothing more than its own exquisiteness. Deploring the inertia of ‘refined sentimentalists … who open their minds to impressions which never have any effect upon their conduct’, Mackenzie attributes to sentimental fiction a ‘separation of conscience from feeling’ which is, he adds, ‘a depravity of the most pernicious sort’. Even in its foremost examples, it cultivates nothing better than self-admiration, and disengages the will from forms of practical action that only less modish virtues – duty, principle – have the power to impel.

Hernandez, Alex Eric. <i>The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy: Modernity and the Art of Ordinary Suffering</i>.

Affective Profit

212 volume’s disobliging price may be forbidding . Heinz-Joachim Müllenbrock University of Göttingen PATRICIA MEYER SPACKS. Novel Beginnings : Experiments in EighteenthCentury English Fiction. New Haven and London: Yale, 2006. Pp. ix ⫹ 309. $33. This wide-ranging yet beautifully focused survey of the novel explores its varieties without assuming realism, or indeed any other quality, to be its generic goal. Ms. Spacks acknowledges categorization as a necessary artifice for the critic, and the loose, interconnected categories she employs—novels of adventure , development, consciousness, sentiment, manners, gothicism, and politics —allow for a roughly chronological progression through the century’s fiction without ever becoming restrictive. The emphasis throughout is on unusual juxtapositions of novels, and on a thorough integration of the famous with the less known, and of the works of male and female writers. The scope and swift pace leave little room for close attention to verbal texture or tone, but her telling details still convey the novels’ life. Plot remains (as it is in her Desire and Truth) one of Ms. Spacks’s central concerns, and many summaries here that might be tedious in other hands are lively. Discussing differences of narrative pace often ignored, she illustrates divergent practices that flourished when narrative conventions were still unsettled. She appreciates bold experiments usually given scant attention in literary histories , such as Barker’s ‘‘psychologically tantalizing’’ stories that deliberately refuse explanation, or the unusual drama of Sarah Fielding’s The Cry, in which consciousness is not rendered, as in Richardson or Sterne, but ‘‘contemplated .’’ Particularly acute on sentimental fiction, Ms. Spacks dismisses the usual moralizing of passive or active response in favor of an aesthetic pleasure in harmonious patterns of experience and emotion. A concluding chapter on Tristram Shandy shows how its exploitation of and challenge to the ways of previous novelists illustrate how much in the way of fictional conventions the experimental genre had already produced—and adds that those conventions, far from being fixed, were continually being reshaped by all practitioners. An Afterword on the nineteenth-century novel points out what riches it inherited from the previous century, but refuses a narrative of generic improvement. The nineteenth-century novel settled down, Ms. Spacks suggests, but what it gained in maturity and consistency it lost in urgency, variety, and exuberance, the qualities so brilliantly celebrated here. Jane Spencer University of Exeter JUDITH BROOME. Fictive Domains: Body, Landscape, and Nostalgia, 1717– 1770. Lewisburg: Bucknell, 2007. Pp. 191. $43. Given the sense of loss that suffuses eighteenth-century writing, it is surprising how little critical attention has been paid to nostalgia as a cultural phenomenon . This gap has only recently begun to be addressed, most prominently by Aaron Santesso’s study of mid-century poetry, A Careful Longing: The Poetics and Problems of Nostalgia (2006). Ms. Broome’s project rests on the observation that ‘‘the cultural nostalgia that pervaded the eighteenth century—a nameless longing—manifested itself in cultural constructions of body and land- ...

In Samuel Jackson Pratt's Shenstone-Green; Or, The New Paradise Lost (1779), the antidote to female reading and its political correlative, naive idealism, is masculine “Common-sense.” The sympathetic identification encouraged by sentimental fictions with their “fancy, and folly, and fine sense, which … is no sense at all” is measured by Pratt against the standard of the evaluative detachment exercised by men skeptical of a universal capacity for benevolence. Few, he contends, are now willing to acknowledge the hierarchical values that such a standard ratifies. The ubiquitous non-sense that keeps “the presses in employment” instead exploits the authority of print to nourish the effeminacy on which sentimental reading depends. The habits of private reading in turn infiltrate the political realm by encouraging a belief in social progress and in the efficacy of universal benevolence. In resisting these, Shenstone-Green consequently rejects the notion of sensibility, which it construes as a pernicious idealization of human nature. At the same time, the novel condemns the conservative politics of nostalgia, with its tacit assumption that there exists a group of men (Man of Feeling) or women (Millenium Hall) whose natural disinterestedness would secure social order. But Pratt's intentions are not simply confrontational. While Ruth Perry has suggested that the novel lacks “a serious vision of an alternative way of life,” it does in fact advocate a pragmatic accommodation of “benevolence and business”. This middle-class ethos is succinctly expressed in the “Golden Rules of Œconomy” that concluded his earlier work, Liberal Opinions (1775–6): “Get honestly, and give cautiously” (VI.221).

R e v i e w s Gevirtz, B^en Bloom. LifeAfter Death: Widows and the English Novel, Defoe toAusten. Newark: Uof Delaware P , 2005. 218 pp. Midwaythroughthefamoussoliloquythatconstitutesthefinal,“Penelope chapterofJamesJoyce’sUlysses,MollyBloommusesforamomentonher ownnameandontheliterarycharacterswhoshareit,concludingherreflec¬ tionwithanutterrejectionofassociationwithoneinparticular:“Idont likebookswithaMollyinthemlikethatonehebroughtmeabouttheone fromFlandersawhorealwaysshopliftinganythingshecouldclothandstu andyardsofit”(622).CaughtinMolly’smemoryofthebooksshehasread is Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, whose eponymous heroine consistently and skillfullymanipulatesahostofidentitiesasrichasMolly’sowninner^wor Mollfirstassumeshermostinfamouspseudonym,“Mrs.Flanders,wen she impersonates arich widow after her debtor husband has fled to the ^n tinent.Widow-whore-thief:thefluid,opportunisticfigureofMollFlaners hasretainedherslippery,dangerous,anddisreputablestatusferintoe imaginations of twentieth- and twenty-first-century readers.As aw atleast,asacharacterwhoexploitstheliminalstatusofwidowsdunnge eighteenth century by professing to be awidow—Moll figures pronunen y among the multitude of widows in eighteenth-century fiction “^° Karen Bloom Gevirtz’s recent book. Life After Death: Widows ^ lish Novel, Defoe toAusten, is devoted. Neither tied to ahus an nor feminine wild cards in eighteenth-century in their own nght. father/guardian, widows were society: sexually experienced, able to own property mobile in ways that wives and daughters were not. LifeAfterDeatharguesthatthepotentiallysubversivefigureottne widow was mobilized by writers of eighteenth-century prose ction in Britain to reflect and shape contemporary anxieties about the emergent mer¬ cantile,capitalisteconomy,andtolimitwomen’sparticipationinttasnew economicsystem.Sensibility,vtithitsprivilegingoffeelingandItsrei ofcharitablebehavior,iscrucialtothisargument;since“[h]owcharacters disposeoftheirmoney”isonewayofdefining“correctsentimentalbehavior at the same time that it defines class differences and financial values, eigh¬ teenth-centurynovelsparticipatedincontemporarysocialandeconomic debatesby“encouragingwomentoavoidusingthepowerinherentinwid¬ owhood, and with it active, commercial activity. ..the novel’s virtuous widows tend to eschew profit-oriented commercialism or employ commer¬ cial activity for altruism or dependence” (22). Gevirtz argues that the atti¬ tudes towards widows that eighteenth-century novels exhibit were consistent throughout the century, despite the diversity of authors and hisIntertexts ,Vo\. 11, No. 12007 ©Texas Tech University Press 8 0 I N T E R T E X T S torical moments in which they were written: taken together, they constitute aconsistent effort to “control female economic activity” (17) by limiting women’s acceptable participation in the emerging capitalist system, ensuring their firm ensconcement within the domestic, rather than the commercial, sphere. She thus aligns the depiction of widows in eighteenth-century fic¬ tion with the overall “separating and gendering of the public and private, the commercial and domestic” (19) assumed by many historians and literary scholars to have developed over the period. Life After Death organizes its literary widows thematically rather than chronologically further to underscore the consistency of their depictions across the century. Virtuous, affluent widows reinforced emerging notions of femininity by exemplifying “either arejection of capitalism as asystem, or of women’s participation in it” (27) through their maternal, benevolent, and community-oriented behavior; their nonvirtuous counterparts (like Fielding’s Ladies Booby and Bellaston) use their affluence and autonomy to indulge in lecherous behavior and selfish economic activity. Working widows were only acceptable insofar as “readers never see them exchanging their products or services for repayment”(69), as in the case of the upright ladies of Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall {1762)-, or insofar as their monetary ambi¬ tions are limited to providing for children, or benefiting acommunity as a whole (as with Pamela's dairywoman Mrs. Dobson). In the case of working widows, Gevirtz invokes the ideology of sensibility as “a useful tool for stabi¬ lizing asociety unbalanced by rising commercialism, particularly as it described proper female behavior as removed from economics” (93). If women had to work, it should only be out of necessity or care, and most emphatically not for profit or self-aggrandizement. Sensibility is also key for understanding eighteenth-century authors’ treatment of impoverished widows, representations of whom were “one part of sentimental fiction’s contribution to efforts to stabilize society through justifying amoral class inequality” (99); as acharitable object, the figure of the widow reinforced “traditional associations of power and action with men, and passivity and gratitude with women” (101). The anxieties about widows thatsuchsentimentaldepictionsattemptedtoassuagereturnwithfullforce in the case of criminal widows like Defoe’s Moll Flanders, who in their con¬ flation of sexual and economic desire “exemplify attributes of unregulated, emergent capitalism that particularly would have made people fearful, including the satiation of one’s individual appetite regardless of the cost to others, the ability to change self and class rapidly, the ability to buy the hall...

<i>The Sentimental Novel in the Eighteenth Century</i>. Ed. Albert J. Rivero.

Reviewed by: Godless Fictions in the Eighteenth Century: A Literary History of Atheism by James Bryant Reeves Lisa O'Connell James Bryant Reeves, Godless Fictions in the Eighteenth Century: A Literary History of Atheism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2020). Pp. 260. $99.99 cloth. That God is dead is a commonplace of modern literary history and, at least until recently, of the secularization and modernization narratives that have shaped our understanding of Enlightenment. Yet, despite the presence of many atheists in eighteenth-century fiction, the "literary history of atheism" has largely gone untold. In Godless Fictions in the Eighteenth Century, James Reeves aims to change that. He offers a fresh, post-secular take on the literary representation of religious non-belief in Britain, arguing that it animated a broad sweep of early fiction, from Tory satire and verse essay to sentimental-moral fiction and pre-Romantic poetry. Reeves's five author-focused chapters make the case that atheism functioned as a richly "generative literary concept" (5–6) and that it did so precisely as a reviled Other for eighteenth-century fictional worlds. The book begins with twinned chapters on Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope, for whom the rise of atheistic materialism signaled the degeneracy and dullness of the age. Paradoxically, atheism energized each author's most excoriating satires, including The Dunciad and Gulliver's Travels. The analysis continues into less well-traversed literary territory, with chapters on Sarah Fielding and Phebe Gibbes, mid-late-century female writers of didactic novels (David Simple, Lady Louisa Stroud, and Hartly House, Calcutta), whose polite marriage plots, Reeves insists, were no less reliant on godless worlds and characters, set here against author-sanctioned modes of sympathy, sociability, and (female) community tied to Christian belief. Pivoting back to canonical verse, the book's concluding chapter examines a selection of William Cowper's poems and hymns, in which his abiding opposition to atheism grounds an emergent Romantic critique of slavery, imperialism, and oppression. It is fair to say that, for Reeves, atheism's literary history unfolds under the dispensation of an English Anglican nation-state for which unbelief was the antithesis of a godly, ordered society. Accordingly, British authors became "preoccupied with unbelief," he argues, either as a force of imaginative chaos or as a reliable fictional means "to interrogate discourses of selfhood, sociability, tolerance and empire" (5). Only belatedly, under the influence of avowedly atheist writers like Percy Shelley (whose 1810–11 epistolary prank "The Necessity of Atheism" is the subject of the book's coda) as well as the promise of radical political transformation fueled by revolutionary critiques of religion and absolute authority, did the literary treatment of atheism detach from belief and godliness and connect to modern secularization narratives. Even as it unsettles secularization narratives, however, Godless Fictions does not seek to historicize the literary representation of unbelief by framing it within received intellectual histories of atheism or materialism, or even within the politics of the English state which regulated Christian orthodoxy and promoted broader moral reform and outreach efforts. Instead, Reeves's key analytical move is to insist on the primarily affective nature of literary responses to unbelief, noting that "[r]ather than arguing against atheism on rational or epistemological grounds, eighteenth-century literature often rejects it out of pure reflexive disdain" (7). Early in his study, Reeves tells us that, while eighteenth-century commentators and divines [End Page 339] routinely conflated atheism with Christian heterodoxy (Deism, Socinianism, anti-Trinitarianism, etc.), this was not the case in the literary sphere where the atheist emerged as a reviled fictional figure, native to satiric-dystopic speculative worlds and the minor characterology of the novel. Reeves's affect-oriented approach yields two important insights. The first is that British fiction's recurring negative treatment of godless worlds and characters—materialists, dunces, rakes, freethinkers, misanthropes, and the like (all reviled and almost all male)—is subtended by a steady and insistent theism. But this is not a theism tied to religious creed or to Christian-theological argument. It is, rather, as Reeves notes, precognitive, affective, and intensely imaginative, defined by its hostility to unbelief rather than by any positive or prescriptive conception of the divine. A...

396 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 6:4 of Berglund's book as the symbol of eighteenth-century female wish-fulfilment, does not constitute Austen's final word on the subject. Perhaps the largest problem with this work is its historical arbitrariness and cultural vacuity. The introductory survey of the position of middle-class women at the end of the eighteenth century certainly explains the interest of these writers in the social and psychological dimensions of domestic space, but it does not account for (or even recognize) a much longer, larger cultural interest. It is as if house imagery bloomed suddenly among these three women writers in response to new or sharply felt social conditions. The houserepresents -owner (or-ought-to) theme, of course, goes back through Palladio to Vitruvius, and its literary history is rich: elaborately treated in the works of Roman poets, revived in England with the country-house poems of Jonson, Donne, and Marvel, re-idealized by Pope, Fielding, Smollett, and Byron, and surfacing in many less obvious works from Defoe 's A Journal of the Plague Year to Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall, the image of the house has been a standard fixture of English literature. Berglund's rather mechanical dichotomy between male and female experiences of confined space (for men "there is never any doubt ... that confinement is bad and liberty good. ...[PJersecution ... comes from outside their family circle," pp. 16, 102) pays no attention to the literary works of Defoe (and only briefly mentions Richardson), or to the critical work, among others, of W.B. Camochan and John Bender. Although Berglund cites Mark Girouard's indispensable Life in the English Country House, she makes no comparable use of his rich historical background to contextualize the apparently dramatic debuts of her chosen authors . Woman's Whole Existence follows the boundaries of gendered literary space; it does not push them. Cynthia Wall University of Virginia Gary Kelly. Women, Writing, and Revolution: 1790-1827. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. ? + 328pp. £35.00. ISBN 0-19-812272-1. The political importance of women's writing, and particularly women's fiction, in the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary decades of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is now well established. Among the critics who have contributed over the past twenty years or so to our developing understanding of this literature, Marilyn Butler, Mary Poovey, Terry Lovell, Nancy Armstrong, Claudia Johnson, Janet Todd, and Patricia Meyer Spacks spring immediately to mind. So does Gary Kelly. Alongside the work of these female and feminist commentators, Gary Kelly's studies of fiction in the Revolutionary period—The English Jacobin Novel (1976) and English Fiction of the Romantic Period 1789-1830 (1989)—scrupulously map the interventions made by novels in political debate and ideological struggle. In doing so, they inevitably engage with the importance of women's writing; and in Kelly's recent book on Mary WoUstonecraft , Revolutionary Feminism (1992), and now in Women, Writing, and Revolution, that focus on the revolutionary role of women has become explicit. In the preface to Women, Writing, and Revolution Kelly presents his method of "historical enquiry" as having "much to offer" both to "women's literary studies" and to "Uterary and cultural studies in general" (p. vi). And he enlists strong feminist support for this unexceptionable position, quoting both Rita Felski and Laurie Finke on the importance of investigating the particular meanings of gender and feminism within specific cultural and REVIEWS 397 socio-economic formations. Thereafter, KeUy confines his engagement with current feminist analyses to footnote references and concentrates on offering the results of his own "historical enquiry." His study is divided into two equal sections: "Women and Writing in the Revolutionary Decade" focuses on the 1790s; "Women, Writing, and the Revolutionary Aftermath" deals with the remaining thirty years of his chosen period. Both sections follow exactly the same pattern: a lucid and densely documented overview of the gendered politics of writing in the period is foUowed by chapters on the careers of three individual women—Helen Maria Williams, Mary Hays, and Elizabeth Hamilton. Through these case-studies of women who, in very different ways, "challenged discursive , generic, and stylistic orders that subordinated women and their writing" (p. vi...