The Circumstantial View of Life: Narrative and the Novelistic Peripeteia

How does one bring together those concepts derived from narrative theory and those from studies of eighteenth-century literature? Given that one set of concepts are universal and all encompassing, and the other deliberately particular and partial, how does one fit or accommodate the former to the latter? If the collected essays in Narrative Concepts in the Study of Eighteenth-Century Literature, edited by Steinby and Mäkikalli, do not provide a definitive answer to such questions, they do provide several fruitful approaches for interrogating concept formation and application in both fields. The collection largely does so while avoiding a particular trap: using eighteenth-century texts to fill out already extant narrative concepts, under the false belief that narratology gives “the tools for dealing with formal traits in narrative discourse, to which historical research adds content and context,” which the editors note is “simplistic and defective.”The introduction to Narrative Concepts provides a brief yet useful history of narrative theory from its classical to post-classical phase (notably past the period in the 1980s when narrative theory was “proclaimed as good as dead”). The editors mine the conflicts between how concepts are defined in narrative theory and in literary studies of the eighteenth century. While a concept in narrative theory “contains everything—and nothing but—what belongs to the content of the concept,” operating “universally and immutably,” for historically oriented literary critics concepts look different in different historical periods. But the more crucial difference might be that for literary scholars “forms... cannot be defined abstractly, apart from context.” Cumulatively, these differences, as the editors note, “are bound to cause difficulties in attempts to dovetail or fuse narratology with historical literary research.”Given that this fusing is what the volume aims to achieve, the editors have set themselves an arduous task, one compounded because (as these essays detail) narratological concepts are often derived from eighteenth-century novels themselves. The collection’s approach to these difficulties is scattershot but productive: although the collection proceeds in chapters around specific concepts (like “Focalization,” “Authorial Narration” and “Paratext”), the collection can also be understood to cluster around different options for taking up narrative theory in conjunction with eighteenth-century literature. I might have called those options “revise” (Fludernik, Kukkonen, Mäkikalli, Steinby, Nitschke, and Prichard), “reject” (Richetti, Birke, and Rogers), and “relate” (McKeon, Waldschmidt, and Ikonen).The bulk of the essays in the collection test concepts derived from narrative theory against eighteenth-century prose forms, with differing results. Monika Fludernik, for example, probes Franz Stanzel’s hypothesis that perspectivism (“the reader’s ability to visualize the setting in precise and empirically validatable terms”) comes only with focalization. Reading from Defoe to the Gothic novel, Fludernik argues perspectivism does not proceed in tandem with focalization, which come together only at the end of the nineteenth century. Karin Kukkonen also revises a narratological concept, tellability, via her reading of Maria Anna Sagar’s Karolinens Tagebuch (1774). While the marvelous is required for tellability, Kukkonen argues it has an “upper limit”: “the marvelous needs to be embedded in the probability of the fictional world so that it can lead readers back to an instructive realization about the real world.” Essays by the editors also revise, arguing definitions of realism must reconsider temporality: Mäkikalli marks the difference between the “cyclical” view of time in Oroonoko and the “chronological, concrete, ‘real’ and secular time” of Defoe; Steinby argues that Genette ignores “whether reality is seen as atemporally or temporally ordered.” Other scholars find the fit of concepts from narrative theory to eighteenth-century prose forms more apt even as they add nuance: Claudia Nitschke explores how immediacy is generated by different levels of the text and is tied to the emergence of a specific aesthetic of literature (reflecting on itself), while Penny Pritchard examines characterization in funeral sermons, both typical and not, and finds that these sermons are “strikingly comparable to contemporary works of fictional narrative.”A smaller set of essays in the collection operate more critically, using eighteenth-century literary texts to reject or altogether undo concepts provided by narrative theory. For Richetti, for example, plot in Fielding’s Tom Jones is “a visible rhetorical artifice,” and not “an unfolding or exploration of the uncertain destinies or developing identities of his characters.” Richetti argues that there is tension, however, between Fielding’s comic romance and the text’s own historicity (its critique of institutions), one made evident in the text’s minor characters. Dorothee Birke’s essay usefully critiques definitions of authorial narration as omniscient, controlling and thereby “reactionary.” She shows that, in texts like Tom Jones, narration instead reflects on “the problem of the novelist’s authority,” as “narratorial comments problematize authorial control at the same time at which they invoke it.” Finally, Rogers’s essay on Edmund Curll’s paratexts pulls a bit away from the aims of the collection. By providing lists of the operations of Curll’s excessive and eccentric paratexts, Rogers displays how they function far less like Genette’s threshold than Derrida’s substitute (replacing the main text). Indeed, as Rogers finally puts it, Curll “may be said to have taken [the paratext’s] use almost to the point where our habitual category comes close to dissolution.”In shadowing forth dissolution, Rogers’s essay operates as a provocation for the collection as a whole, in that it sketches inherent problems in narrative theory’s attempts to categorize, order, and define. These problems are considered anew in a set of essays that explore how concepts in eighteenth-century literature themselves reflect on boundary making, eschewing that making in favor of drawing relations. First, McKeon historicizes concept formation in narrative theory, arguing that Genette misreads Socrates and Plato, and that, following this misreading, Genette, Bal, and Watt get realism wrong (equating realism with mimesis). Further, McKeon argues that eighteenth-century literature (particularly free indirect discourse, which “thematize[s] its formal technique of representation”) challenges the supposedly universal categories of the narratologists, as it operates as “a reminder of the historicity of narrative form.” For Christine Waldschmidt, too, narrative theory could more directly address a particular relation of form and content: “the relation between narrative representation and its message.” Reading Lessing and Schiller, she argues that “in the eighteenth century, before the advent of a literature of disinterestedness, most narratives would present awareness of a tension between narrative form and the thought that they convey.” That tension is a possibility and sometimes a problem. Finally, Teemu Ikonen’s essay satisfyingly proposes a new understanding of peritext, as “dispositional” rather than a “stabilizing structure” that defines a narrative genre. Reading revisions made by Diderot and Laclos, Ikonen demonstrates that peritexts can create “hybrid forms and fluidity between author, narrator, and other discursive agents; between narrative and other discourse types; and interactions on the boundary between text and context.” As such, peritexts in eighteenth-century France “question the tendency to posit textual boundaries first and foremost as separators of the artistic text from its historical surroundings.” Ikonen’s essay is a fitting end for the collection as a whole: considering concepts as highlighting relations rather than marking boundaries, scholars of the eighteenth century might see in this collection new ways of integrating narrative theory into their own work.

Historicizing Literary Cognitivism Suzanne Keen Alan Richardson, The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). Pp. xv, 179. $35.00. Blakey Vermeule, Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). Pp. xiv, 273. $60.00. New books by Alan Richardson and Blakey Vermeule represent the continuing historicizing project of recent works in literary cognitivism published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. As Lisa Zunshine writes in her Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies (Johns Hopkins, 2010), "investigating the role of universally shared features of human cognition in historically specific forms of cultural production" (2) extends the aims of Raymond Williams in seeing literary art as continuous with everyday life and social institutions, while protecting cognitivists from the charges of ahistorical universalizing. Anxious to correct the impression that cognitive science applied to literature demotes texts to mere records of the human mind/brain in ordinary action, Zunshine asserts that contextual cognitivists aim "not merely to use such artifacts to illustrate a particular scientific hypothesis about one particular feature of human cognition" (3). Instead, cognitivists restore the missing "evolved human brain" to a more integrated matrix of culture, author, reader, and text (8) in discussions of techniques, representations, and influence. Alan Richardson, whose prior work British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (2001) established the impact of late-eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century discoveries about nerves and brains on the imagery of Romantic writers, stakes the claim of "neural historicism": "The question now is not why should students of literature engage with work in the mind and brain sciences but how?" (Neural Sublime, ix). Richardson and Vermeule demonstrate several different modes of how that engagement might be carried out, intersecting with traditional sources and influences studies and with narrative theory, among other modes relevant to students and teachers of eighteenth-century literature. [End Page 535] The books engage with eighteenth-century texts to different degrees. Blakey Vermeule begins disarmingly with an account of her students' resistance to regarding J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999) as a response to Richardson's Clarissa (ix) (a position her tenth chapter brilliantly defends); indeed, her range of reference in Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? is extremely broad, extending from Homer to Ian McEwan. Roughly half the book concerns more conventionally recognizable eighteenth-century fictions. Chapter 5, "The Fantasy of Exposure and Narrative Development in Eighteenth-Century Britain," treats Caleb Williams and Pamela, with glancing references to Pope's poetry. Chapter 6, "God Novels," explores what Vermeule names the "high mind-reading tradition" (129) by examining narrative techniques in Tom Jones and Clarissa. Chapter 7, "Gossip and Literary Narratives," briefly considers Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (1957), Patricia Meyer Spacks's Gossip (1985), Catherine Gallagher's Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (1994), and William Warner's Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 (1998). Chapter 8, "What's the Matter with Miss Bates?," discusses Jane Austen's fiction, while chapter 9, "Mind Blindness," discusses Swift and Hogarth in a broader consideration of eighteenth-century satire. Chapter 10 returns to Clarissa by way of its reflections on Coetzee. The eighteenth century and especially the eighteenth-century novel serve as home base for Vermeule's discursive orbits. Alan Richardson's briefer book also demonstrates disparate interests, in the sublime, the status of mental images, apostrophe, Theory of Mind, sibling incest, and the speech known as motherese (or parentese), but its center of gravity is Romanticism. As Richardson writes, each chapter seeks to "reorient an unresolved issue within Romantic studies by recourse to cognitive theory, to indicate new possibilities for cognitive literary criticism, and to introduce readers to a given area in cognitive, neuroscientific, or evolutionary thought" (xii). Richardson's literary historical commitments keep the period at the center of discussions of Percy Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Mary Shelley, Keats, Walter Scott, and Jane Austen. Burke on the sublime, Bentham on incest avoidance, Herder, Rousseau, and William Smellie on theories of language supply the sources and influences at the heart of Richardson's contextualizing "neural...

Essays in Narrative and Fictionality: Reassessing Nine Central Concepts

Unexpected Bodies in Eighteenth-Century German Culture Patricia Anne Simpson and Birgit Tautz Since the 1990s, interdisciplinary scholarship has been reframing a discourse about "extraordinary" bodies (Rosemarie Garland-Thomson) and the cultural construction of these as "unexpected" from a range of perspectives, including queer studies, intersectional feminism, posthumanism, disability studies, ecocriticism, and critical race theory. Garland-Thomson's path-breaking work decisively shifted a medicalized discourse to another register. Her intervention has reverberated across academic disciplines and activist platforms alike. The body—erroneously presumed to be human—continues to organize inquiry into the limits of the human. Although scholarship about the body frequently reflects presentist perspectives, eighteenth-century aesthetics, with anthropocentric roots in Enlightenment thought and totalizing tendencies derived from assumptions about the body as a self-identical, logical "whole" likewise offer extensive material for the analysis of bodies beyond the human. In a previous "Forum on (New) Directions" (2021), two contributions, in particular, highlight the innovation related to "unexpected" bodies in our field. Stephanie M. Hilger's"Medical Humanities and the Eighteenth Century" calls attention to the health humanities, which "allow for a fresh perspective"; she elaborates: "Eighteenth-century thinkers wrestled with the separation of the humanities/mind from the sciences/body, yet they rarely questioned the supremacy of the mind."1 Eleoma Bodammer's "Disability Studies and New Directions in Eighteenth-Century German Studies" seeks to extend the model of critical disability studies to our field, encouraging a discussion that "could take a variety of directions that might help to explain responses to disability in aesthetic theories, debates on humanity, and the history of emotions."2 This, the final forum section of our editorship, builds beyond the horizons of the medical humanities and critical disability studies by foregrounding the cultural construction of the "body" and all its articulations in the eighteenth century. The contributions impressively show that, although anthropomorphic beliefs about the wholeness of the body frequently seek to ground and legitimize themselves in the eighteenth century, the actual historical landscape was much more porous, multifaceted, and in flux, indeed decentering anthropocentric mindsets, creative dispositions, and perspectives on eighteenth-century literature, culture, and the body. [End Page 137] The contributions to this forum bring the "unexpected" bodies into focus: they are extraordinary, anomalous, amorphous. Inspired by two panels sponsored by the LLC Forum Executive Committee on Eighteenth- and Early-Nineteenth-Century German Literature, the contributors contemplate a range of human and nonhuman bodies marked by gender, ability, race, anomaly, and associations in the material and ecological environment. Bodies of water, plant life, bewitched bodies, and aesthetic, "uncontainable" bodies—all invite an innovative reimagining of German-speaking European literature and culture in multiple representations of nonnormative, nonconforming bodies. Patricia Anne Simpson University of Nebraska-Lincoln Bowdoin College Birgit Tautz University of Nebraska-Lincoln Bowdoin College NOTES 1. Stephanie M. Hilger," Medical Humanities and the Eighteenth Century," Goethe Yearbook 28 (2021): 301–06, here 304. 2. Eleoma Bodammer, "Disability Studies and New Directions in Eighteenth-Century German Studies," Goethe Yearbook 28 (2021): 307–313, here 310. Supplemental Bibliography Allingham, Liesl. "Gender and Narrative Crisis in Christoph Martin Wieland's 'Novella without a Title.'" The Eighteenth Century: Theory & Interpretation 56, no. 4 (2015): 427–44. Google Scholar Calzoni, Raul and Greta Perletti. Monstrous Anatomies: Literary and Scientific Imagination in Britain and Germany during the Long Nineteenth Century. Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2015. Google Scholar Dale, Amelia. The Printed Reader: Gender, Quixotism, and Textual Bodies in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2019. Google Scholar Davis, Lennard. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995. Google Scholar Deutsch, Helen and Felicity Nussbaum, eds. Defects: Engendering the Modern Body. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2000. Google Scholar Engelstein, Stefani. Anxious Anatomy: The Conception of the Human Form in Literary and Naturalist Discourse. Albany: SUNY P, 2009. Google Scholar Farr, Jason S. Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2019. Google Scholar Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. Google Scholar ———. Staring: How We Look. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Google Scholar ———, ed. Freakery: Cultural Spectacles...

Eternity is in love with the productions of time. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell As we begin at last to approach our end, we end up, as it were, back at the beginning of what is usually understood as narrative theory. While I have, in other words, been looking closely at some of the movements, individuals, and ideas that together form what I have been calling a prehistory of narrative theory, our turn now to Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, Gerard Genette, and the consolidation of these ideas in the form of structuralist narratology takes us to the point where most accounts of narrative theory rightly begin. Indeed, as I said in the Introduction, although the story–discourse relation is one that we can trace conceptually from Aristotle to the Russian Formalists and beyond, the terms derive their current disciplinary force from a moment in the late 1960s and early 1970s when a combination of intellectual and political conditions – particularly in France – made not only possible but also seemingly necessary a narrative theory that could draw at once on structuralist linguistics, Russian Formalist poetics, and critical theories derived from Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. As I will suggest, it is with the appearance of Kristeva's, Barthes's, and Genette's major works (along with a number of others that I will mention along the way) that narrative theory begins to take its current institutional shape and to be defined in terms of controversies, problems, questions, and developments internal to it as a discipline. Where, however, their place as founders of contemporary narrative theory is obvious and secure, what is less visible is their own vital and contested relation to the messy and exciting intellectual context I have been working to sketch out over the course of this book.

Keeping Faith with Literature

I guess semiotics was originally to blame for my current predilection towards the text. John Fiske and John Hartley’s Reading Television was one of the first academic books on television I ever read. The way it looked at TV was suggested in its title, ‘reading’ television almost like a literary text, but how refreshing it was to find a book that took television (and the study of it) seriously. The semi scientific discourse that semiotics initially brought to the study of television (and popular culture in general) was crucial to its gradual acceptance into the academy, slowly giving the whole enterprise some greatly needed academic credibility. Just as importantly, it also allowed television studies to skilfully dodge the inevitable question about whether television was actually worthy of critical attention at all. As Mythologies – Roland Barthes’ 1957 seminal account of popular culture – made so clear, semiotics could be applied to any cultural form (from wrestling matches to washing powder), so that the question of whether TV merited critical attention suddenly seemed unimportant and even irrelevant. The ‘decoding’ of every cultural form was suddenly allowed; you were not necessarily saying it was ‘Great Art,’ you were simply exposing the mechanics by which your chosen text operated. (At least that was our story and we were sticking to it). Important textbooks like Robert C. Allen’s edited Channels of Discourse in 1987 followed, expanding the study of television further by introducing primarily textual methodologies such as semiotics, ideology, genre, narrative theory, postmodernism and psychoanalysis more forcefully into the field. However, the book The Joy of Text?: Television and Textual Analysis

German Quixotism, or Sentimental Reading: Musäus's Richardson Satires John P. Heins Over the last tiiirty-five years or so, scholars ofeighteenth-century German literature have attempted to expand earlier conceptions ofliterary and cultural value by filling in the picture ofthe print culture ofthat era. Where previously the artistic triumphs ofGoethe and Schiller's Weimar classicism provided the privileged object of interest for most scholars, in more recent decades a fuller variety of literary movements and cultural expressions has been subjected to renewed and more broadly conceived scholarly exploration. In particular, the field ofsentimentalism {Empfindsamkeit) has benefited gready from diis new attention.1 The centrality of this movement to eighteenth-century German literature and thought has been reestablished , particularly in the relation of the movement to questions of genre and thus to the hierarchies ofprint culture, as well as to larger 1 Among book-length studies, see especially Georgjäger, Empfindsamkeit undRoman: Weltgeschichte , Tlteorie und Kritik im 18. undfrühen 19.Jaltrhundert (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1969); Gerhard Sauder, Empfindsamkeit,vol. 1 (Stuttgart:Metzler, 1974);WolfgangDoktor,.D¿e.Krií¿* derEmpfindsamkeit (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1975); Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Dereuropäisc/ie Roman der Empfindsamkeit (Wiesbaden: Athenaion, 1977); Nikolaus Wegmann, Diskurse der Empfindsamkeit· ZurGeschichteânes Gefühls in derLiteraturdes 18.Jalirhunderts (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1988). I would like to thankAlex and Karen Winter-Nelson for facilitating the first version of this article, and Margaret Gonglewski and Walter Rankin for enabling die final version. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 16, Number 3, April 2004 420 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION questions of literary representation and of the role of the arts in modern societies.2 What a literary representation is, and how one does or should respond to it, are questions central to debates around die sentimental novel, and, not coincidentally, central to quixotism. Since the publication of Cervantes' Don Quixote in the early seventeenth century, the "quixotic problem" experienced awide variety of expressions in European cultures as writers used the quixotic figure to explore die relationship ofliterature to the empirical realm. In the eighteenth century especially, die literary engagementwith quixotism addresses die function ofaesthetic illusion as it satirically or humorously portrays the purported effects ofreading imaginative literature. The quixote is the literal-minded reader who mistakenly believes diat die world portrayed in literature is literally true, and then interprets die empirical world according to die terms and forms supplied by the particular category ofliterary fictions.3 Eighteenth-century Germanlanguage portrayals of this literal-minded reader, the quixote, are generally intended satirically, in contrast to the portrayal of Don Quixote as a heroic and noble dreamer in later periods.4 A particularly significant eighteenth-century German variant of quixotism is, in fact, the satirical portrayal of sentiment; in the German context, we may risk the generalization that quixotism and sentimentalism tend to appear together. Perhaps more than in other national literatures in the eighteenth century, in German literature the quixote is the unwitting victim of sentimental novels.5 The On the relationship ofsentimentalism to the novel genre, in addition toJäger (above) see also Dieter Kimpel, Der Roman der Aufklärung (1670-1774), 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1977) and Wilhelm Vosskamp, Romantheorie in Deutschland: Von Martin Opitz bisFriedrich von Blanckenburg(Stuttgart: Metzler, 1973). On the emerging stratification ofthe print market, see Helmuth Kiesel and Paul Munch, Gesellschaß und Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert: Voraussetzungen undEntstehungdes literarischen Markts in Deutschland (Munich: Beck, 1977). My definition here differs from other recent definitions because it prioritizes misreading over the naive belief in ideals and the reader's tragi-comic sympathy (Jürgen Jacobs, Don Quijote in derAufklärung [Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 1992]), the idealistic madness and the form of die quest (Ronald Paulson, Don Quixote in England- TlteAestlielics ofLaugliter [Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998]), and idiosyncratic reason (Wendy Motooka, The Age ofReasons: Quixotism, Sentimentalism and Political Economy in EigliteenthCentury Britain [London: Roudedge, 1998]). Jacobs, above; Theo In der Smitten, Don Qiixote (der "riclitigc" under der "fabelte") und sieben deutscheLeser (Bern: Lang, 1986). See especiallyJacobs, and Lieselotte Kurth, Die zweite Wirklichkeit: Studien zum Roman des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), for informative discussions of eighteenth-century German quixotism, neither of which, however, exhausts die question...

IntroductionDavid Blewett The shelf-life of a work of literary criticism is rarely long. For that reason, the essays in this number—even when in strong disagreement with Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel (1957)—constitute a tribute to the remarkable staying power of a book that may be said to have opened up eighteenth-century fiction as an area of serious scholarly investigation. That honour is shared, as is sometimes forgotten, with another fine study of the early novel published the year before, Alan Dugald McKillop's The Early Masters ofEnglish Fiction (1956), its comparatively innocuous title nowadays even more controversial than Watt's. But it was Watt's thesis, announced in his title, that set off a long line of responses, many with titles alluding to his—The Rise ofthe WomanNovelist, The Origins ofthe English Novel, Before Novels, Institutions of the English Novel, The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, and, not without a touch of exasperation, The True Story of the Novel. The shadow cast by The Rise of the Novel is so long that general studies of the early novel are still written in its shade. Appropriately, the numberbegins with an essay by Ian Watt, the plenary address he gave in 1978 atthe annual meeting ofthe Southeastern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and now published for the first time. In a fascinating slice of intellectual autobiography, Watt mounted a witty defence of the critical stance and the terms he had employed twentyone years earlier, a withering attack upon French structuralism and the "monstrous assumption" that literary criticism is "inherently superior to literature itself," and a heartfelt plea for a recognition ofthe "common and equal possession of shared interests and feelings" of critics and readers alike. Several of the contributors to this number recall reading The Rise ofthe Novel when it first appeared and are able to attest to the powerful impact EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 12, Number 2-3, January-April 2000 142 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION it had on a generation of scholars and to its enduring power. Among them are the six essayists who come next. Reminding us of what undergraduate study ofthe eighteenth century was like before Watt's book appeared, Bliss Camochan analyses the reasons for its importance—above all its learning lightly worn and its "sheer readability": "It is the blending, howeverjudicious and inconspicuous, of socio-cultural-philosophical learning into the body ofhis argument that made Watt's book the right one at the right time." Max Byrd's is the tribute of a practising novelist to a master who knows how a novel is made: "I find absolutely true and right Watt's central argument that the 'defining characteristic' of the novel is 'realism.' " Both Michael Seidel and Robert Alter accord primacy to Watt in providing a lucid historical explanation ofthe social and cultural forces thatbrought about the paradigm shift in prose narrative in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Seidel in a wide-ranging discussion ofEuropean literature powerfully defends Watt's concept of "formal realism as a dominant characteristic of narrative during the early eighteenth century." Alter tests the "elasticity of Watt's underlying conception of the novel" against two postmodern novels "that would seem to run counter to the terms of the genre" Watt maps out. For Paul Hunter, too, remembering reading The Rise ofthe Novel shortly after its appearance is to recapture the critical excitement, the "strong reception" of the book, though he is less wholehearted in his admiration than the critics mentioned so far. For Hunter, Watt's "crucial theoretical and historical observation" lies not in his famous, "if somewhat slippery definition of the novel," but in his "insight about readers as makers indirect oftexts." Hunter here is primarily concerned with that great seeker of audiences, Defoe, whose treatment by Watt he does not find entirely satisfying, and he calls for a more subtle and complex approach to Defoe that "today's changing models of intellectual analysis" may be able to yield. Maximillian Novak, recalling the days when FR Leavis's The Great Tradition (1948), with its dismissal of most eighteenth-century fiction , was probably "the most influential work on the novel," tells...

The <i>Goethe Yearbook</i> is a publication of the Goethe Society of North America, showcasing North American and international scholarship on Goethe and other authors and aspects of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Volume 30 seeks to prompt discussion of new directions in eighteenth-century scholarship with special sections on Enlightenment legacies of race and on the robust scholarship that rethinks the eighteenth-century body beyond the human organism. Beyond the two special sections there are articles on Wieland's Alceste, several essays on sex and gender (e.g., on Goethe's Werther; on gender, genre, and authorship in La Roche and Goethe; and on continued gender bias in scholarship on the German eighteenth century), a co-authored article on Goethe's Roman elegies, and an article on performativity and gestures in Kleist. The customary book review section rounds out the volume.

Mere Inventions of the Imagination

History, a Literary Artifact? The Traveling Concept of Narrative in/on Historiographic Discourse

Pamela: Domestic Servitude, Marriage, and the NovelRobert Folkenflik Ian Watt has analysed Pamela in highly persuasive terms as a "courtship" plot which has for its substructure such realities of eighteenth-century marriage as the difficulties of spinsterhood following the breakdown of the extended family, the numerical surplus of marriagable women to men, and so forth.1 I see the book rather from the perspective of "social and relative duties," centring on the relation of self to others and the tensions between social and religious roles. For this purpose , the major point of the novel is not that Pamela is nubile and will finally marry her employer-tormenter, but that she is a servant and is effectively "incarcerated" in her employer's household. Interestingly, even those critical ofWatt's position, such as Nancy K. Miller and Nancy Armstrong , tend to ignore this fact: for example, Miller says "Pamela ... can be divided thematically into two parts: the first dominated by a daughter 's confrontation with (aggressive) male sexuality, the second by her transformation from daughter to wife and the testing of marriage as an integrator of sexuality."2 1 Ian Watt, TAe Rise of the Novel (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1964), pp. 188-89. This essay is meant to extend some of the lines of thought in my "A Room of Pamela's Own," ELH 39 (1972), 585-96. I hope to bring some of the elements of Richardson's ideology into sharper focus here. Together the essays will form a chapter in a book on the eighteenth-century novel which I am completing. References are to the Riverside Edition of Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, ed. T.C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971). 2 Nancy K. Miller, The Heroine's Text: Readings in the French and English Novel, 1722-1782 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 5, Number 3, April 1993 254 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Pamela's incarceration shares certain of the elements described by Erving Goffman in his essay "Characteristics of Total Institutions." In ordinary life, at least in modern society, "the individual tends to sleep, play, and work in different places, with different co-participants, under different authorities, and without an overall rational plan. The central feature of total institutions can be described as a breakdown of the barriers ordinarily separating these three spheres of life."3 Such institutions may be voluntarily or involuntarily entered, and would include monasteries and mental hospitals as well as prisons. The primary feature of the total institution , then, is that "all aspects of life are conducted in the same place and under the same single authority." Pamela does not share her experience with a large number of other people acting the same way at the same time; her solitary confinement is one of the things that make her plight more moving. From the perspective of the total institution, we should first observe that Pamela's imprisonment, while she is enduring Mr B.'s prolonged attempt to triumph over her virginity, begins when she is already, in Goffman's terms, an inmate of a total institution : that of domestic servitude in the eighteenth century. Goffman does not give such servitude as one of his examples, and the actual conditions of the domestic servant in the eighteenth century were probably not quite regimented enough to qualify in most households. And J. Jean Hecht suggests that the locale of servants' recreations was not always on the master's estate.4 Yet certainly the theoretical existence of the ser- (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), p. 46; cf. also p. 165n2; Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History ofthe Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). In his chapter on Pamela, "Richardson and the Domestication of Service," Michael McKeon puts the role of the servant into the perspective of the longue durée from feudalism to capitalism. See The Origins ofthe English Novel 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 357-81. Bruce Robbins comments on Pamela only in passing in his highly suggestive The Servant's Hand: English Fictionfrom Below (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968). He makes the important general point, however, that the servant...

Did You Say Middle Class? The Question of Taste and the Rise of the Novel Robert Mayer The different ways of relating to realities and fictions, of believing in fictions and the realities they simulate, with more or less distance and detachment , are very closely linked to the different possible positions in social space and, consequently, bound up with the systems of dispositions ... characteristic of the different classes and class fractions. Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.1 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction One of the principal ways that Ian Watt set the terms for exploring the appearance and growing importance of the novel in England in the long eighteenth century was to argue that the novel was made possible by a great shift in the socio-cultural field of early modern Britain, a shift Watt described as an alteration in "the centre of gravity of the reading public sufficient ... to place the middle class as a whole in a dominating position for the first time."2 Watt's argument was not new, and it has, in one 1 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (France, 1979; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 5-6. References are to this edition. The title of this essay was suggested by the appendix to Bourdieu, "Price Formation and the Anticipation of Profits," Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 90-102. 2 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957), p. 48. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 12, Number 2-3, January-April 2000 278 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION sense or another, been repeated in much of the scholarship on the novel in the years since he published his study. As early as 1860, a writer in Fraser's Magazine argued that Samuel Richardson's Pamela was aimed at "the class to which its heroine belonged," and Ernest A. Baker, in his History of the English Novel, pointed out that Thomas Deloney (like Daniel Defoe after him) "knew the people whom he portrayed [weavers and clothiers] ... had shared their lot, and was, in fact, writing for them to read." Recently, J. Paul Hunter, examining Watt's '"triple rise' thesis," accepted the latter's "fundamental assumptions about literary origins" and set out to demonstrate "that the newly literate took their needs and desires to other reading materials before there were novels to address them."3 Yet although the idea that the novel is a form engendered by the rise ofthe middle class to prominence and power in England and one that responded to middle-class taste has long been one of the grounding assumptions of discussions of eighteenth-century English fiction, all scholars of the novel have recognized that such assertions raise more questions than they answer. What does it mean to invoke the concept of the middle class in the context of early modern Britain? How does one discern and describe the elusive phenomenon that is "taste"? Are there such things as "class tastes" and how does one specify a class taste?4Watt dealt with the last two sets ofquestions through content analysis and thereby set a pattern that most scholars have followed. He found in the works of Defoe and Richardson in particular the crucial values and beliefs of the newly risen middle class: individualism, capitalism, Puritanism, and a new view of love, sexuality, and gender roles. Hunter continues this tradition with his analyses of "what was new about the novel" and of "what was on the minds of potential readers" in the eighteenth century.5 These discussions and others like them are of 3 W.F.P., "British Novelists—Richardson, Miss Austen, Scott," Fraser's Magazine for Town and Country 61 (Jan.-June 1860), 26; Ernest A. Baker, The History of the English Novel, 10 vols (1936; New York: Barnes and Noble, 1960), 2:171; for a similar assertion about Defoe, see 3:227. J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts ofEighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990), pp. 66, 68; the "triple rise thesis" is that...

A Tale of Two Theories