Novel Beginnings: Experiments in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction by Patricia Meyer Spacks

Abstract

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- ...