The Sentimental Novel in the Eighteenth Century ed. by Albert J. Rivero

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Sentimental Novel in the Eighteenth Century ed. by Albert J. Rivero Sören Hammerschmidt Albert J. Rivero, ed., The Sentimental Novel in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2019). Pp. 258. $99.99 cloth. In The Sentimental Novel in the Eighteenth Century, Albert Rivero and his contributors set out to "present an authoritative and suggestive exploration of the sentimental novel in the eighteenth century" (1) in an effort to "demonstrate … that the sentimental novel continues to engage readers and critics" and that "[f]ar from being obsolete or only of antiquary interest, the sentimental novel remains a vibrant and exciting area of study" (11). There is no doubt that they achieve this goal, and they do so with aplomb as they offer a rich survey of the eighteenth-century sentimental novel shot through with new insights that make this moderately slim volume both a comprehensive introduction to the genre and a valuable intervention in its study. The volume contains Rivero's introduction, a "Select Bibliography" of essential primary and secondary sources, and twelve chapters written by experts in the field on important subgenres, themes, and issues in the study of eighteenth-century sentimental novels. The collection's chapters, Rivero tells us in the introduction, "are arranged to tell a coherent, roughly chronological story" without sacrificing "differences of opinion or critical methodology" (5). All chapters devote at least some space to distilling the latest state of discussion in their subfield before suggesting new approaches and interpretations, some more emphatically than others. [End Page 740] Even better, in the process of assembling and arranging this exceptional collection of chapters, Rivero actually manages to achieve something far different and far greater than a mere collection of individual studies, as he embeds their literary-historical and critical discussions within a gripping narrative about the sentimental novel in the eighteenth century. Gary Kelly's chapter, "The Sentimental Novel and Politics," lays the perfect groundwork for such a narrative as much as for a collection of scholarly investigations of disparate aspects of the sentimental novel dispersed across time and space. It establishes a framework for those other investigations by mulling over the question of how "the sentimental novel in the eighteenth century"—a conglomeration of text, book object, genre, and other accretions of social, cultural, political, and economic categories—might make meanings of its own while simultaneously help its "users" make meanings of their own. For Kelly, such meaning-making involving sentimental novels was above all focused on the formulation and promotion of an emergent, "plural and contested discourse of modernity centred on the topic of self-reflexive personal identity as the basis for 'pure' or disinterested yet more intensely interested relations of intimacy, conjugality, domesticity, sociability, community, ethnicity, nationality, citizenship, humanity, nature and spirituality" (16). He concludes that "[b]ecause the novel had relatively wide circulation among middle and upper ranks, those with most at stake in the onset of modernity, it was a highly useful form of print for imagining, promoting and contesting versions of modernity in their interests" (17). Kelly's chapter thus supplies the other chapters' more specific interests and case studies with a conceptual, carefully and elaborately theorized underpinning of sorts: a test and confirmation of the notion—assumed more or less as given in other chapters—that "the sentimental novel in the eighteenth century" could and did indeed have social, cultural, economic, political, or otherwise discursive or material impacts. Through selection and management of chapter topics as well as the careful arrangement of the chapters' order, Rivero and his contributors make individual chapters speak to and inform each other; in exceptional cases, chapters help to shape and sharpen each other's arguments. And even chapters that don't explicitly relate their discussions to those offered elsewhere within the collection frequently serve to elucidate arguments forwarded in other chapters. In a best-case scenario such as Joseph Bartolomeo's chapter on "The Sentimental Novel in America"—which could easily and maybe usefully have been distributed across two or three chapters given the range and variety of material it tries to cover—the thematic strands of several other chapters (notably those by Barbara Benedict, Bonnie Latimer, Brycchan...