Lyric Generations: Poetry and the Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century by G. Gabrielle Starr

Abstract

522 Reviews He concentrates on Gay's Polly, set in theWest Indies, at the expense of the more Scriblerian Beggar's Opera, though he does attempt to readMacheath's collection of 'doxies', via orientalist conceptions of the harem, as slave-related, a process far too attenuated to command assent. There is simply too much else happening in these texts to laymuch blame on African slavery. Richardson's reading of Swift's A Modest Proposal in terms of a 'land of slaves' actually tends to deprive Swift's Irish of a specific history. While genocide and slavery may originate in similar mental configurations, they are not the same thing. If Richardson's focus is sometimes too wide, it is also often too narrow. He does cite accounts of slavery from some Defoe novels, but he does not mention Defoe's own association with Harley, and, astonishingly, fails tomention Robinson Crusoe at all. This is a serious omission, given that novel's concern with slavery, cannibalism, colonial authority, master-servant (or -slave) relations, and pseudo-anthropological encounters with otherness. Itwas also, of course, perhaps themajor literary source of Swift's own ideological disgust at Britain's colonial project. A book about the whole range of writing about slavery in the first half of the eighteenth century might have had amore equitable moral foundation. UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL PAUL BAINES Lyric Generations: Poetry and the Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century. By G. GABRIELLE STARR. Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2004. X+298pp. ?31. ISBNo-8oI8-7379-7. This dense and thoughtful book starts from the observation that in the biggest novel of the mid-eighteenth century, the heroine (Clarissa) responds to her rape with a lyric expressiveness that resembles the biblical poetry of Job. The novel, that is to say, absorbs and is reconstituted by a specifically poetic subjectivity in search of a participatory reader. Subsequent chapters confirm under-observed correspondences between lyric and novel in the poet-novelist Behn, in the verse epistle (generated from the isolations of lyric), in the disappearing selves of Gray and the reappearance of the body in first-person novelistic narratives. The book ends with encounters in the zone of domesticity between Cowper, Wordsworth, and Austen, with Charlotte Smith an influential cross-over figure. The central concern of the book is subjectivity and its literary incarnations, and in this novel and poetry play contrapuntal, not antipathetic, parts, each posing formal problems that the other absorbs and solves. In G. Gabrielle Starr's analysis, novels provide representations of consciousness that are rhetorical rather than mimetic, amatter of interchange between text and reader rather than a mirror of the world. The book's sense of history is almost exclusively formalist and there is little attempt at historical context for any of the shifts it describes. It comes as a shock to be reminded of anything outside textual osmosis, aswhen issues of subjectivity are teasingly aligned (p. 8o) with the aftermath of the Civil War and Act of Union. (This might have been explained by one of the book's trademark endnote mini-essays, which occupy a quarter of the text.) The literary history is also rather selective: 'lyric' here means Donne and Herbert, not Rochester. The history of the novel presented here is that of Behn and Haywood rather than Defoe, though an effort to include the unpoetical novelist ismade by focusing on a raremoment of emotional intensity inRoxana. It is the simultaneous inwardness and outreach of Richardson rather than the programmatic authority of Fielding that occupies centre stage, though again Starr manages to insert a tiny hook into Fielding's burlesque invocations. Even within Richardson, however, there are significant blind spots, for Starr is really interested only in figures of suffering. As a MLR, IOI.2, 2006 523 whole Clarissa displays considerable hostility towards secular lyric, and while Starr notices that Lovelace's persona derives in part from Rochesterian song, she is too keen to align him with the elegiac Donne and pays no attention to themarked genesis of his persona and speech within Restoration drama. The near-complete exclusion of drama in general does leave one cause for wonder: many writers were fluent in...