Shifting Genres, Changing Realities: Reading the Late Eighteenth-Century Novel (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 431 Laurie Fitzgerald. Shifting Genres, Changing Realities: Reading the Late Eighteenth -Century Novel. The Age of Revolution and Romanticism, no. 8. New York: Peter Lang, 1995. 140pp. $46.95. ISBN 0-8204-2305-X. Shifting Genres, Changing Realities is part of an interdisciplinary series focusing on "a crucial period in European cultural and Literary history." According to the advertisement at the end of the book, the emphasis of the series "is on studies that transcend traditional boundaries between disciplines and that focus on interactions of literature, art, philosophy and politics." This ambitious proclamation, itself enticing, and the title of Laurie Fitzgerald's volume lead one to anticipate much that the book does not deliver. Scholars from Northrop Frye, Michel Foucault, and Nancy Armstrong to Claudia Johnson have noted that there was a veritable change or disruption in the historical and social order of the latter part of the eighteenth century that is mirrored in literature. One expects a new study focusing on genres and "realities" to deal with this socio-historical shift in a significant way. Unfortunately, a large part of Fitzgerald's time is taken up with details of plots and the book fails to explain why there were these "shifting genres" or what exactly were the "changing realities" in the late eighteenth century. The intention of the work is to explore "representative late eighteenth-century novels in an attempt to discuss more precisely how they work and how they are constructed, how they are similar to and different from the canonical novels, and how contemporary readers might have responded to them" (p. 2). Fitzgerald chooses "a Gothic novel (77ie Italian), a doctrinaire novel (Mount Henneth), two sentimental or domestic novels (Edward and Cecilia), and one novel, The Old Manor House, that seems to straddle all three categories" (p. 3). Her choice of works is laudable in its mix of female and male authors, of popular and lesser-known texts, but one wonders about her mechanical classification of the novels. Her point is, after all, that generic boundaries are becoming blurred. In her introductory chapter, which "reconsiders" the late eighteenth-century novel, Fitzgerald pays tribute to Ian Watt and borrows from Doreen Maitre's notions of realism , distinguishing between those fictions composed of actual historical events, those of entirely imaginative events that nonetheless could be actual, and those that could never be actual (p. 5). Disregarding current notions of representation, self-referentiality, and intertextuality in narrative studies, she argues that "the artistic success of a novel ultimately rests on whether or not the reader accepts or rejects it as realistic in the sense of 'true to life'" (p. 5). For Fitzgerald, "even the most fantastic fictional worlds—such as Radcliffe 's Protestant-nightmare version of Italian monasteries and the Inquisition—derive their power from their relationship to the 'real world' as the author and the reader have experienced it" (p. 6). The obsession here with realism is puzzling and inconsistent as, in the second chapter, "Anatomy of the Late Eighteenth-Century Novel," Fitzgerald then proposes that there is a "mixture of genres in a given novel" (p. 16). Some of these genres or "kinds" (p. 17), such as the romance, the Utopian tale, and the Oriental tale, are not primarily concerned with mimesis. One large problem with Fitzgerald's book is that she fails to define the key terms she employs. For instance, the vexed terms "romance" and "romantic" are used loosely to refer to all the novels which end in marriage, to characters such as Charlotte Smith's Orlando who have sentimental views (p. 101), and also to Radcliffe's landscapes (p. 85). Her argument that these novels are "romances" or end with "romance patterns" (p. 117) is at times unconvincing. Fitzgerald reads John Moore's Edward as a novel which fails to sustain social criticism because it ends with "the romantic myth of Edward's marriage" (p. 35). She quotes at length a scene depicting an aristocratic couple, Sir Mathew Maukish and his lady, who are forced to stop their carriage because of an accident involving a 432 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 8:3 sailor with a wooden leg. Sir Mathew concludes that the overturning of the...