130 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 11:1 Is it possible that the eighteenth-century reception of Sancho was as uncritical as this? We are told (p. 148) that in Joseph Andrews Joseph plays the role of the sensible Sancho Panza to Adams's Quixote. But cowardice is Sancho's defining characteristic and courage is Joseph's. Is Paulson too partial to Sancho? Paulson seems to claim both too much and too little for Cervantic influence. "Don Quixote," we are told on the opening page, "made it possible to read the Aeneid as another Quixotic fiction that says classical epic is as inappropriate to our 'modern' times as chivalric romance was to Cervantes'" (p. ix). It played a part, certainly: but if one was backing any single horse for this degree of importance, Dryden's Aeneid translation is more likely to pass the winning post first. In sober truth, however, the development of a mass market for imaginative fiction (a multi-faceted phenomenon) was the overall process to which any one text was contributing. If he is here claiming too much, Paulson also seems to neglect Cervantes for large stretches of the discussion. Sometimes that is because, as with Addison, there are only occasional allusions to Cervantes to work on. But one suspects that he could have made an argument very close to the one that (almost) drives the book without making Cervantes as central as he does. Don Quixote in England is in many ways a marvellous book, but in some ways a Quixotic one. Brean S. Hammond University of Wales, Aberystwyth Julia A. Stern. The Plight ofFeeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early AmericanNovel. Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1977. xiii + 306pp. US$48.00 (cloth); US$18.95 (paper). ISBN 0-226- 77310-8. The tradition ofthe early American novel—comprising those texts produced in the compressed, contentious, and politically unstable decade ofthe post-Revolutionary 1790s—was for so long the object of aesthetic disdain and embarrassment among critics (when, indeed, it was acknowledged by critics to be a tradition at all) that the recent explosion of scholarly interest in these texts marks something of a watershed in American literary criticism. A growing number of recent studies on early American fiction—a trend that owes its beginnings to Cathy N. Davidson's Revolution and the Word, 1986—reappraise America's earliest novels in the light ofcontemporary critical theory and in the context ofthe complex historical moment in which they appeared. Julia Stern's Plight ofFeeling is one of the latest, and also one of the best, additions to this new and welcome body of scholarship. The Plight of Feeling describes the political landscape of the 1790s, where a Federalist hegemony ofrule by an élite few is threatened by emergentJeffersonian democracy and its promise of empowering the many. More important, however, this landscape is one in which both Jeffersonian and Federalist formulations of community are haunted by the voices and forms of those excluded altogether REVIEWS 131 from the nation's founding vision. As Stern describes it, "the new republic is built on a faulty foundation, a metaphorical crypt peopled by those Americans whose futures have been foreclosed by the incomplete promises of the Founding" (p. 9). It is the voices of these buried undead that erupt in the decade's fiction as the increasingly Gothic underbelly to the era's dominant sentimental mode. The three novels that Stern examines at length—Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple, Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette, and Charles Brockden Brown's Ormond— emerge as texts that expose the costs of the founding's limited vision, that mourn the loss of those who have been figuratively buried alive through their political exclusion, and that present an "alternative vision of democratic community" (p. 7) based on homosocial affective relations between women. While these novels were once dismissed as impoverished, incomplete, or inept in form, Stern reads their formal "problems" instead as evocations of the political difficulties that they engage. Indeed, one ofthe aims of The Plight ofFeeling is "to restore to critical view the full formal complexity and cultural resonance of early American fiction" (pp. 3-4), an aim that this book achieves brilliantly through its...
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Jan 1, 2003
Marion Rust 
