The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History and the Waverley Novels (review)

Abstract

82 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 5:1 Years' War, on Smollett's relation to contemporary events, on the sources of and influences on the form of the Adventures ofan Atom, on composition, attribution, and so forth. The notes, exhaustive as they must be, are supplemented by an allegorical key to the characters. The volume is accompanied by a number of the prints that the original edition included, though one wonders, since not all the original prints are reproduced, what governed the principle of selection. Preston, on the other hand, shows much less sensitivity to the rhetorical complexities of Humphry Clinker. The body of his introduction is largely innocent of critical tension , though there are dutiful citations of important articles on the novel. After touching on the question of genre (identified as the "epistolary travel book" [p. xxv]), Preston considers some general thematic concerns—matters of character and of language—before concluding with a section which argues that the novel goes "beyond fact and fiction." All of this disappoints: Preston wants to celebrate the "realism" in the novel, without much sense that that is a difficult and contentious term to use, especially of the eighteenth-century novel, and above all of Smollett's characteristically grotesque, experimental , and fragmentary fictions. The focus on character amplifies Preston's primarily thematic emphasis, as does his quite full treatment of language. He seems largely uninterested in the question of how Smollett's use of dialect might reveal his attitude to women or class, which are self-evidently major issues, and hardly require the critic to be in touch with the latest critical trends. In the concluding section, "Beyond Fact and Fiction," Preston argues, in his own words, that "facts inform the slender plot of the novel more extensively than has ever been suspected" (p. xxxviii), which serves as the final proof of the novel's refreshing realism. By invoking the names of Avrom Fleishmann and Wolfgang Iser, he attempts to lend an aura of sophistication to this relatively simple interpretation, but the final test, apparently, comes in the form of the number of real-world inns or public houses that Smollett's characters and, many years later, Preston himself visit. Richard Kroll University of California, Irvine Ina Ferris. 77ie Achievement ofLiterary Authority: Gender, History and the Waverley Novels. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. xii + 261pp. US$34.50. ISBN 0-8014-2630-8. It is now twenty-five years since Hans Robert Jauss delivered his inaugural lecture at the University of Konstanz, "Literaturgeschichte als Provokation der Literaturwissenschaft," as the manifesto of a revolution in literary history, one that would employ the new perspective of phenomenological reception theory to recast and make respectable once more those old and disreputable national literary histories, which we can no longer believe in but cannot yet do without. As many impatient observers have already noted, that revolution has been very slow to arrive. While Jauss certainly spawned a generation of researchers in Germany and elsewhere who have busily investigated the reception of various texts and have written interpretive histories of them, the goal of recasting national literary histories has so far been elusive. In recent years literary histories have in fact become ever more like encyclopaedias, fragmentary and syncretic. I once argued that two problems about writing the sort of history Jauss envisioned are the physical difficulty of amassing the materials for a literary history based on reception, REVIEWS 83 of locating the fugitive journalism, reviews, letters, and diaries that enable the historian to comprehend the life a particular text led in the ever-changing collective mind of its public; and the intellectual difficulty ofcomprehending each separate instance of reception in the context of the author's mental horizon, of understanding the question to which the response constitutes an answer. The chasm between the growing list of interpretive histories of individual texts and the unfulfilled promise of national literary histories based on reception theory suggests that these problems may be less difficult than I thought— but that there was a third and more crucial problem that was not being addressed: that of framing broad general historical hypotheses so that reception theory can help provide the answers. To this third problem Ina...