Eighteenth-century Fiction Research Articles

The Politics of Jane Austen (review)

REVIEWS 117 Le livre débute et s'achève de manière piquante par la transcription des deux entrevues menées par Cusset avec deux personnalités fort opposées dans leur interprétation du libertinage: la féministe Nancy K. Miller et le romancier Philippe Sollers. Marie-France Silver Collège Glendon, Université York Edward Neill. The Politics ofJaneAusten. London: Macmillan; New York: St Martin's Press, 1999. xiii + 175pp. ISBN 0-333-74719-4. Edward Neill quotes Mark Twain's famous lament that "It seems a great pity ... that they allowed ... [Jane Austen] to die a natural death" (p. 6). Neill's book should be required reading for those who nod in agreement with Twain; others will need no convincing. The Politics of Jane Austen opens Austen's texts to a range of theoretical considerations; its analysis is perceptive, at times exciting, and always witty in tone. Neill takes on the '"Fogeyland' traditions of Austen critique" (p. 10), which he sees perpetuated in the "Hollywood kitsch for small and large screen" (p. 6) examined in the final chapter, a target announced by the book's handsome cover— Colin Firth as Mr Darcy. Neill also interrogates the direction scholarship has taken after Marilyn Butler's Jane Austen and the War ofIdeas; the much-needed historicism has come at a price—the reduction of Austen to "a swash-buckling Tory whose sword leaped from her scabbard to defend a Burkean view of things" (p. 2) and whose "creative energy goes into keeping kings on thrones, bishops in palaces and lesser lights in their places" (p. 3). For Neill, much of Austen scholarship can be characterized by a "certain theoretical naivety, a deproblematizing of (inter)textuality and the condition of writing itself," leaving "considerations of language, representation and subjectivity virtually untouched, and techniques of presentation virtually ignored" (p. 4). Freeing Austen from being "'bastillea for life' by an exclusive concentration on the cultural matrix ... of the 'Revolutionary Decade' " (p. 13), Neill argues that her "fictional discourse is ... politically destabilized and destabilizing" (p. ix). Sense and Sensibility, for example, "Setting itself to detect and expel symptoms of Sensibility ... actually becomes more exercised by misapplications of Sense, and its analysis of the social inferno has much in common with Blake's" (p. 50). Neill firmly places Austen in such company as William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley (rather than seeing her in opposition to radical writers of the Romantic period, as many critics do). The argument that all Austen's texts "raise questions about 'the total social structure' " (p. 10) is somewhat undermined when Neill claims that in Persuasion "matters are taken a good deal further" (p. 116) even to the point of causing "authorial panic in the face of its own success in 'rendering' the crumbling of old certainties and stabilities" (p. 113). Austen is "brushing her own previous work 118 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 13:1 against the grain, and writing a novel which is prepared in some measure to treat its immediate predecessors as 'past barbarisms.' [It] is thus ... something of a recantation " (p. 112). It remains unclear in what ways Persuasion is more radical than Sense and Sensibility with its "almost Paine-ite ... rogues' gallery of gentry folk" (p. 6); for Neill to claim that it is reinscribes a fairly conventional reading of Austen—near the end of her career, the value structure she had endorsed begins to disintegrate. While seeing Austen's Persuasion as more questioning of class than the other novels, Neill depicts her view of the navy as uncritical (while simultaneously insisting that her texts are ambiguous): "She certainly writes some glorious 'publicity material' for 'happy warriors' " (p. 1 19). This celebratory tone "was inspired , perhaps, by Jane's Admiral brothers, to whom, indeed, the navy-intoxicated peroration may be addressed" (p. 135). This reproduces the very critical assumptions about the author which Neill claims to dismantle, and is particularly puzzling given his preface's overly dismissive remarks about biographies bypassing "much recent sophisticated critical writing which is the authentic cultural convoy for Austen's textualities, Austen as text" (p. xi). The book's greatest strength is its critical agility and theoretical range in showing an...

Styles of Meaning and Meanings of Style in Richardson's "Clarissa" , and: Anger, Guilt, and the Psychology of Self in "Clarissa" (review)

102 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 13:1 onward "he has no supporters against Fielding for over twenty years" (pp. 2034 ). Not Michie's use of Jauss's sometimes inconvenient categories, his reliance on pre-existing bibliographies, or his focus on Anglo-American texts, but rather his application of a narrower instead of a broader definition of what counts as commentary on Richardson and Fielding may cause dissatisfaction with his general findings. Nevertheless, anyone aware of the vast quantity of material that Michie addresses will surely respect and enjoy his ambitious attempt to appraise it in a consistent and meaningful manner. He treats not only such influential commentators as Johnson, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Scott, Thackeray, Stephen, Leavis, and Watt but also a wealth of statements by less familar writers such as Margaret Oliphant (1869). His commentary on nineteenth-century reception is the most original and informative part of his study, since the response in this period has been the least well known. Furthermore, although his Jaussian project considers "how appreciations of Richardson or Fielding individually are significantly transformed when they are read as a pair" (p. 143), he does not make forced efforts to "get to the point where the Richardson/Fielding opposition can be transcended" (p. 17). Rather, in taking issue with the "institutionalized" and "ongoing distorton ofboth Richardson and Fielding as individual authors" (p. 193), his history of their "linked canonization " (p. 59) provides categories to use in seeking to recover and disentangle their intertwining but separate authorial questions with the help of "increasingly thorough and responsible biographical criticism" (p. 160). Michie's reception study, finally, sends us back to the task of interpreting Richardson's and Fielding's novels in relation to primary research that continues to interrogate the biographical and ideological conditions of the rivalrous production of their writings. David C. Hensley McGiIl University Gordon D. Fulton. Styles ofMeaning andMeanings ofStyle in Richardson 's "Clarissa". Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1999. xiv + 250pp. ISBN 0-7735-1849-5. Victor J. Lams. Anger, Guilt, and the Psychology of Self in "Clarissa". Bern and New York: Peter Lang, 1999. xvi + 210pp. US$46.95. ISBN 0-8204-4160-0. These two recent works on Clarissa take strongly theoretical perspectives on Richardson's great novel. Victor J. Lams's study adopts an eclectic array of psychological and theological perspectives, from Aquinas to Heinz Kohut and Paul Ricoeur, in order to explain the dynamics among the Harlowes, Clarissa, and Lovelace. Gordon D. Fulton, on the other hand, uses "literary stylistics," a sociohistorical linguistic approach, to analyse, primarily, the relationship between REVIEWS 103 Lovelace and Clarissa. Both books excel at sensitive, close analysis of textual particulars. Ultimately, Fulton's study contributes more to the current debate in scholarship about Clarissa, as he successfully relates his rhetorical concerns to issues of gender, social class, and historical change in eighteenth-century British literature. Fulton argues that through a self-conscious deployment of different linguistic registers, Richardson challenges readers to examine contemporary gender politics. Lams's book, filled as it is with striking local insights, seems out of touch with contemporary concerns, and its ahistorical approach makes it difficult to apply its analysis to fiction (or to social, linguistic, or psychological issues) beyond its own argument. Nonetheless, critics interested in Clarissa will want to read both Fulton and Lams. Styles ofMeaning and Meanings ofStyles comprises two sections which mirror the terms of the book's title. After a useful introduction to the linguistic theories that the book consistently employs, Fulton provides two chapters on shared resources that speakers employ in the novel: the related discourses of "proverb" and "moral sentiment." Both these forms of generalization serve individuals as shorthand means of communication. Unlike moral sentiments, proverbs do not depend on context to enact their meaning; they constitute an explicit style of meaning that depends on prior agreement between speaker and audience as to their validity. Obsessed with originality and irritated by Lord M.'s sententious (and culturally outdated) use of proverbs, Lovelace is nevertheless deeply affected by his "uncle's proverbialism" (p. 44). Clarissa, on the other hand, expresses herself in the mode of generalization that Fulton calls the "moral sentiment," which arises and...

The Young Philosopher , and: Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (review)

98 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 13:1 effet, d'esquisser «un nouveau visage de Robert Challe» où «vigueur protestataire» et vertiges de l'inquiétude religieuse s'expriment avec bien plus de force. Qu'on en juge par un exemple. Jusqu'à présent, lorsqu'on lisait: «je retombais toujours dans les travers que donnent les affreuses terreurs dont on a été bercé», on ne s'imaginait pas que le texte était: «je retombais toujours dans les transes que...». On voit ici à quel point la confrontation avec le manuscrit nouvellementmis aujour est fructueuse et «donne un sens à des détails qui, autrement, passeraient inaperçu». C'est d'ailleurs l'un des mérites de cette édition nouvelle: outre une pagination qui permet de se reporter sans peine aux éditions antérieures et au manuscrit luim ême, on retrouve un index où figure une liste des variantes les plus significatives, une bibliographie critique, un glossaire, en bref, tout un apparat critique qui font de cette édition un ouvrage de référence et le compagnon indispensable des études sur Challe et sur l'histoire de la philosophie clandestine de l'âge classique. Marc André Bernier Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières Charlotte Smith. The Young Philosopher. Ed. Elizabeth Kraft. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999. xxxv + 397pp. US$47.50 (cloth); US$17.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8131-211-6 Elizabeth Hamilton. Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah. Ed. Pamela Perkins and Shannon Russell. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 1999. 339pp. $15.95. US$12.95; £8.95. ISBN 1-55111-175-6. Charlotte Smith and Elizabeth Hamilton are conventionally positioned as ideologically opposed by critics who make the authors' responses to the revolutionary debate symptomatic of a pervasive and entirely adversarial radicalism and conservatism . These two novels, along with their excellent introductions and notes (and, in the Hamilton edition, appendices that provide a range of contemporary materials), should do much to disallow the reductiveness of such a narrowly political approach, and to encourage a more comprehensive estimate of their authors' strengths. More particularly, both fictions reveal, in very different ways, how seemingly incompatible strands of orthodox and iconoclastic opinion can comfortably, and sometimes creatively, coexist in a single work. By 1798, the year in which The Young Philosopher was published, Charlotte Smith's support for revolutionary principles was more muted than it had been in the earlier Desmond (1791). She still works here with radical metaphors, however, brilliantly literalizing, for example, Godwin's representation in Political Justice of the old order as a small group of custodians oppressing the unawakened masses, through the device of the madhouse to which the heroine's mother, Mrs Glenmorris , is confined by her parody of an aristocratic mother, Lady Mary. And the contrast between the virtuous George Delmont and his dissolute brother Adolphus Delmont is characteristically established through their respective affiliations REVIEWS 99 with radical and anti-Jacobin positions. But many of the narrative innovations in The Young Philosopher—especially the deviations from standard English— reveal a hierarchical frame of mind that sometimes verges on the reactionary. These deviations—of dialect, of class affectation, of false learning—do not affirm aspects of a distinctive culture, as idiomatic speech in Walter Scott does. Instead, as we see in the hero's mediations on the suffering of the heroine from her contact with "the inferior ranks of people, whose grossness must shock her, whose licentious freedoms terrify her" (p. 278), they mark out for condemnation or patronizing those outside the landed gentry, especially the newly rich. Elizabeth Hamilton, too, works at once within and against a numberofdiscursive conventions associated in this instance with her conservative politics. An antiJacobin on subjects relating to religion, she held views on women's education that intersected at key points with those of the radical feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Rejecting an older reading ofHamilton as party political hack, Perkins and Russell apply the insights of feminist, historicist, and postcolonial theoreticians to show the ways in which, both formally and conceptually, Translations ofthe Letters ofa Hindoo Rajah develops its didactic impulses without tendentiousness. Preserving and, where necessary, extending Hamilton's notes (a rich source of references to contemporary antiquarian and orientalist commentary...

Common Ground: Eighteenth-Century English Satiric Fiction and the Poor. Judith Frank

<i>Common Ground: Eighteenth-Century English Satiric Fiction and the Poor</i>. Judith Frank

Mansfield Park (review)

Film Review Mansfield Park. Directed and written by Patricia Rozema. 1999. Advertisements for Patricia Rozema's brilliantly tendentious adaptation of Jane Austen's novel show a half-length picture of Fanny Price looking directly at the viewer while holding a key to her bosom; superimposed on her figure is a small representation of a Georgian house in the classical style, with central pediment and matching wings. It is just such a "modern" house that Mary Crawford encounters in the novel when she comes to Mansfield: "so well placed ... as to deserve to be in any collection of engravings of gentlemen's seats." But as the film quickly shows us, this house is not Mansfield Park at all. The house that the nine-yearold Fanny Price is taken to, in the gloom of a Gothic night, is a ruinous structure dating from the Elizabethan period. Its formal gardens, with their pyramid yews and elaborate parterres, are as old-fashioned as its architecture. Represented by Kirby Hall (the ruined remnant of an Elizabethan "prodigy" house), the cinematic Mansfield Park is closer in character to the novel's Sotherton Park, "ill-placed ... in one of the lowest spots of the park." Oddly, the Elizabethan Sotherton is represented in the film by a "modern" house (Kenwood). The ruined Kirby Hall serves as an appropriate metonym for Rozema's purpose, which is to depict the moral ruin of Mansfield Park's inhabitants. Aided doubtless by her "literary researcher" (mentioned in the credits), she reveals a familiarity with recent scholarship treating the issue of slavery in Mansfield Park. Though slavery is barely touched on in the novel—when Fanny's question to Sir Thomas about the slave trade is met with "such a dead silence" (p. 198)'—scholars such as Moira Ferguson, Edward Said, Ruth Perry, Maaja Stewart, and Brian Southam have argued cogently for its importance, even centrality, to an understanding of the novel. The abolition of the slave trade—if not the emancipation of plantation slaves—had been debated in parliament for decades before a bill was passed into 1 Page references are to Jane Austen's novels, ed. R.W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 12, Number 4, July 2000 566 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 12:4 law in two stages in 1807-8. Austen's family had good reason to feel involved in the question. Her father was the trustee of a plantation in Antigua; her sister Cassandra's fiancé died of yellow fever off Santo Domingo while serving as chaplain of a military mission; her brother James's first wife was the daughter of General Mathew, governor of Grenada; and her naval brothers Francis and Charles knew the West Indian possessions well; the evangelical Francis in particular was a critic of slavery. That Austen was in favour of abolition cannot be doubted. She was in love, she joked to Cassandra in an 1813 letter, with Thomas Clarkson, author of The History of ... The Abolition of the African Slave-Trade (1808); and beyond her humanitarianism she seems more than once to imply a parallel between the slavery of Africans in the colonies and the slavery of dependent women (like Fanny Price) at home. In Emma, Jane Fairfax, fearing her future as a governess, speaks bitterly of "offices for the sale—not quite of human flesh—but of human intellect" (p. 300). Armed with such support, Rozema clearly felt entitled to film Mansfield Park as a story of a world corrupted by its complicity in the ignoble institution of slavery. As the audience leaves the cinema, they hear the insistent rhythms of "Djonga," a slave song of lamentation. In the film itself Rozema's anticolonial aims are most obvious in the changes she made to the characters of Fanny, Sir Thomas, and Tom Bertram. From the beginning of the film Fanny is aware of slavery. On her carriage ride over the Downs to Mansfield Park she sees a ship in the Channel: "Black Cargo," the coachman says, "darkies" brought home as servants for officers' wives. Later, as a young woman, Fanny hears of Edmund's concern over the plantation in Antigua: "we all live on the profits," he admits...

Prefaces, Postscripts and Related Writings (review)

REVIEWS 589 and Due Preparations for the Plague) figure in the Bibliography only as "probable " rather than as "certain" attributions. I found this unsettling; it would have been even more unsettling if they had been banished altogether, and it is precisely this sort of experience that is likely to provoke ire against Furbank and Owens. A crucial factor, then, in one's response to the Bibliography may be one's prior investment in a given work: this is bound to affect the reactions of more senior scholars, who by writing about a work as if it is Defoe's have committed themselves to its belonging in the canon, and are apt to become its partisans for this reason if for no other. The ultimate sorting out of such questions will probably owe more to the open-mindedness of our junior colleagues and graduate students than to the expertise (let alone the authoritativeness) of long-term Defoeans. Several other features of the Bibliography may prove useful: for instance, the synopsis of the contents of each work listed, and the three appendices that give brief historical sketches of Occasional Conformity, the Union with Scotland, and the Bangorian Controversy. G.A. Starr University of California, Berkeley Richardson's Published Commentary on "Clarissa" 1747-65. 3 vols. London : Pickering and Chatto, 1998. Volume 1, Prefaces, Postscripts and Related Writings. Introduction, Jocelyn Harris; ed. Thomas Keymer. xcv +336pp. ISBN 1-85196-461-4. In a chapter of The Boundaries of Fiction: History and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (1996) comparing Swift's Tale ofa Tub with Richardson's Clarissa, Everett Zimmerman points out the following delicious irony of literary history: "The proliferation of prefaces, dedications, notes and other addenda that Swift repudiates scornfully as evidence of the corruptions brought by the [printing] press ... are skillfully manipulated by Richardson for the advantage of his own reputation and what he thought of as the proper reception of his works" (p. 102). If Swift would have been aghast at Richardson's elaborate "modern" and printerly apparatus surrounding and infiltrating Clarissa, what would he have thought of the close-to-infinite regress of my current task—to provide a [reviewer's] commentary upon the [modern critical and editorial] commentary within the first of a three-volume set of [Richardson's] published commentary on Clarissa, itself one of the most self-reflexive works in the eighteenth-century canon? Chatto and Pickering have carried on the task of bringing out the Clarissa Project with this set, which also includes Letters and Passages Restored and the Moral and Instructive Sentiments. The structure of this first volume, dealing with all the prefaces, postscripts, and advertisements to Clarissa and several miscellaneous but related documents, 590 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 12.4 particularly echoes the recursive and ever-circling-back patterns of Clarissa itself: we have have a long, general introduction by Jocelyn Harris, followed by facsimiles of the documents she discusses, in chronological order of publication ( 1747— 65), each bearing a headnote by Tom Keymer that rehearses some of the same issues as the introduction. Two unpublished, ambiguous, but relevant documents are rightly placed in appendices, but other inclusions in the main text make the series' title, Richardson's Published Commentary, in some ways a misnomer: William Warburton's preface to volumes 3 and 4 of the first edition and Albrecht von Haller's review of Clarissa (despite having Richardson's annotations) are not written by the novelist, and neither the "Answer to the Letter of a Very Worthy Gentleman" nor "Meditations Collected from the Sacred Books" was published, but only printed and issued to a select few. Another aberration of a sort is that the preface to the 1751 edition of the novel is not included here, to avoid duplication, because it was a formal part of the Letters and Passages Restored, published separately by Richardson for owners of the first edition, and is therefore part of volume 2; although this is understandable, it slightly diminishes the usefulness of volume 1 as the modern reader must either acquire the eightvolume facsimile of Clarissa, with both preface and postscript included, or volume 2 of the Commentary, to survey the complete editorial apparatus of Clarissa. It is...

Letters and Passages Restored from the Original Manuscripts of the History of Clarissa, 1751 , and: A Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments, Maxims, Cautions, and Reflections, Contained in the Histories of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison, 1755 (review)

REVIEWS 597 Volume 2, Letters and Passages Restoredfrom the Original Manuscripts ofthe History of Clarissa, 1751. Introduction, Peter Sabor, Bibliographic Essay, O.M. Brack, xli + 324pp. Volume 3, A Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments, Maxims, Cautions, and Reflections, Contained in the Histories of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison, 1 755. Introduction, John A. Dussinger, Afterword, Ann Jessie Van Sant. ? + 437pp. Peter Sabor's introduction to Richardson's Letters and Passages Restored (1751) [hereafter LAPR], intellectually rigorous and combative, is primarily a sustained argument to defend Richardson's main alterations of Clarissa in the second and third editions, which follows in the wake of Florian Stuber's introduction (also defensive) to the Clarissa Project's facsimile third edition itself. To some extent, this is the Clarissa Project's necessary line of self-justification, but, in both cases, I found the arguments generally persuasive. Part of Sabor's combative strategy entails using Mark Kinkead-Weekes as a whipping boy—perhaps excessively—because his classic article "Clarissa Restored ?" (1959) asserted that the changes in subsequent editions of Richardson's novel were not restorations but new passages inserted mainly to blacken Lovelace, reducing the subtleties of the novel. (I noted seven instances where his views were strongly repudiated, pp. ix, xi, xv, xvii, xix, xxvii, xxxii nl3—and one where we are told condescendingly that "even Kinkead-Weekes approves" of a particular revision, xxxv n46.) For Sabor's argument (subtitled "Above AU Fears of Prolixity ") is concerned with banishing once and for all the contention that Richardson's changes were all later accretions that had tendentious and didactic purposes. He points to evidence from Richardson's correspondence proving that several "restorations " were definitely in the pre-publication manuscript (which we do not have), even if the total percentage of them that fall into this category is unclear. Richardson , he argues, had simply eliminated them because he so very much feared the consequences ofhis enormous prolixity. To be sure, Saborconcedes that some "restorations ," such as Richardson's revisions regarding Clarissa's attitude towards her father's curse, where Richardson was explicitly responding to specific suggestions by his friends after the initial publication, can definitely be put in the other category . As with many of the documents in this set of three volumes, there is an ultimate indeterminacy—in this case in the precise proportions of genuine restorations to actual later changes. However, Sabor's position that Richardson restored passages simply to rectify former omissions perhaps paints too innocent a picture of the author. Sabor's other line ofdefence is to divide the alterations into several categories— the editorial notes, the dramatized expansion of summaries, and alterations modifying the characterizations of minor and major characters—and proceed to justify each one, on the whole successfully, in my opinion, though not always. In maintaining that those revisions affecting Clarissa's character are not monolithically whitewashing, he is absolutely right to point to one, with her self-recriminations, where "Nothing in William Warner's onslaught on the heroine in his Reading Clarissa exposes her shortcomings more fully" (p. xxvi). However, apart from the 598 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 12:4 admission that the added eulogy of Clarissa by Anna is "rébarbative" (p. xxvii), Sabor strains to vindicate Richardson totally where total vindication is not really necessary. For example, I find unconvincing his defence of the lengthy insertion of the history of the prostitutes, Polly Horton and Sally Martin. Dismissing charges that it is heavy-handed, he insists that they "are not set up as mere didactic ciphers. Each character is more fully developed and more sympathetic because we are given a fuller life" (p. xx). I disagree, finding the histories of these women all too similar to the didactic cautionary tales that Pamela tells her children at the end of part 2. Sally and Polly are presented as stereotypes of those conceited , spoiled, romantic girls who idle their time away in the activities Richardson so often chides—card-playing, novel-reading, and flirting at public amusements— used as anti-types or negative templates to the stilted model Clarissa constructed by Anna's eulogy. Far from being sympathetic, Richardson falls into "blaming the victim " mode, mercilessly...

Histoire de Clarisse Harlove (review)

604 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 12:4 his Collection might be seriously confused by contradictory or at least contrasting sections? The varied tenor of the Collection, while moving it in the direction of literature and enabling modest praise for it from its editors, would have enfeebled it as a work of practical moral guidance for his contemporary audience. Like some of the other projects—large and small—featured in this set of volumes, the ends and means of the Collection are open to question, which makes me a little uneasy with the tendency of the Clarissa Project editors (Keymer apart) to create apologiae for what are, in fact, some of Richardson's more dubious enterprises . Nevertheless, I am also much humbled by the hard work, erudition, and enthusiasm of all the contributors to these volumes, and I am sure that other readers will join me in gratitude for having these elusive documents made available in an authentic format. Lois A. Chaber American Intercontinental University in London Samuel Richardson. Histoire de Clarisse Harlove. Trans, l'abbé Prévost. Ed. with notes by Shelly Charles. 2 vols, 883, and 787 pp. Paris: Éditions Desjonquères, 1999. FFr390. ISBN 2-84321-017-8. The first edition of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa was published in three instalments of seven volumes between December 1747 and December 1748, the last three volumes appearing just two months before Henry Fielding's Tom Jones. After 250 years, the debate about the relative merits of these two great novels continues, yet in one respect Tom Jones has been far more fortunate than its predecessor . Readers of Fielding's novel have a wealth of modern, annotated editions from which to choose, including the standard scholarly edition by Martin Battestin and Fredson Bowers, in both its original hardcover form and its corrected paperback reprint, the more recent Oxford edition by John Bender and Simon Stern, the Norton edition by Sheridan Baker, and the Penguin edition by R.P.C. Mutter, with a new Penguin by Thomas Keymer forthcoming. Clarissa, in contrast, did not receive an annotated edition until 1985, when Angus Ross's huge single-volume Penguin made the first-edition text available for the first time since its initial publication , and provided the only set of explanatory notes that the novel had ever received. In 1990, a facsimile edition of the heavily revised and expanded eightvolume third-edition text of Clarissa was published by AMS, and in 1998 three volumes of accompanying material, Samuel Richardson's Published Commentary on Clarissa, 1747-65, were published by Pickering and Chatto, but Ross's Penguin remained the only annotated edition of the novel. Shelly Charles's superb new edition of Antoine-François Prévost's translation of Clarissa is important in many ways. Like Ross's Penguin, it makes available a text that had long been out of print. Lettres anglaises, ou Histoire de Miss Clarisse Harlove (1751), almost as much an original novel as a translation, was last published in 1846, and relatively few readers have access to any edition of REVIEWS 605 this influential work. Thomas Beebee's "Clarissa" on the Continent (1990), a fine comparative study of Prévost's French and Michaelis's German translation, has made little impact on the recent wave of Clarissa studies: largely, I suspect, because neither Prévost's nor Michaelis's versions of Clarissa is well known to students ofeighteenth-century fiction. Editions Desjonquères deserve our gratitude for making Prévost's Clarissa available in a handsome, robust, and affordable twovolume edition. And Shelly Charles has performed a valuable service in editing the work with such thoroughness and care: the introduction, the copious annotations, and the ancillary material are all of exceptional quality. Although Richardson knew no French, or any language other than English, and although he never crossed the channel, Clarissa became, in Prévost's translation, a canonical work in France. In his biography of Richardson, Alan McKillop cites figures suggesting, surprisingly, that for several decades in the mid-eighteenth century, the novel most often found in private French libraries was Mme de Graffigny's Lettres d'une péruvienne, followed closely by French translations of Pamela, Tom Jones, and...

Introduction

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...

Reconsidering Origins: How Novel Are Theories of the Novel?

Reconsidering Origins: How Novel Are Theories of the Novel? Lennard J. Davis Origins ... are, when great work is concerned, questions for the study and the lecture-room, for the literary historian and the professional critic, rather than for the reader, however intelligent and alert, who wishes to enjoy a masterpiece, and is content simply to enjoy it. George Saintsbury, Introduction to Joseph Andrews (1910) Nobody knows just what a novel is, and nobody knows just where the novel begins. Edward Wagenknecht, Cavalcade ofthe English Novel (1943) At a recent conference on the future of the novel, Terry Castle hurled a Jovian lightning bolt at theories of the early novel: I feel we have reached a saturation-point currently in academic studies of eighteenth-century fiction—at least in those studies that bear on the history of the genre qua genre. While vast gains have been made—and I truly think the genealogical, historical and bibliographic work done on the early English novel over the past twenty years is one of the great triumphs of twentieth-century literary criticism—we also have reached a kind of intellectual dead end, and like exhausted little Lovelaces with word processors can go no further. Castle's point was that all the really essential work on the genre of the eighteenth-century novel had been done, and she went on to specify what she saw as: the soaring critical trajectory extending from Watt (the great First Cause) through Richetti, McKeon, Davis, Armstrong, Bender, Hunter, Spacks, Doody, Gallagher and numerous others. I don't think we need further exposition of such matters as EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 12, Number 2-3, January-April 2000 480 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION the relationship between the novel and the romance, or the novel and the criminal biography, or the novel and spiritual autobiography, or indeed the novel and any other form of early popular literature. I don't think we need further exploration of the economics of novel production, of the early eighteenth-century literary marketplace, of the role of women in the popularization of prose fiction. I don't think we need a further rehashing of the synergy between the early novel and capitalism, the novel and empire, the novel and domesticity and sexual politics. Nor indeed do we really need more disquisition on the novel and its relation to the larger English literary canon. My sense is that we have gained all the yardage we have needed on these points at least for a while—indeed I happen to think that with Cathy Gallagher's brilliantly multifaceted Nobody 's Story—the true successor and necessary supplement to Watt—I think that the ball of eighteenth-century novel studies has been definitively kicked through the goal posts.1 As the final declamation whizzed by, one could feel a pain that spread through the audience, mainly the pain of graduate students, in the room. Their feeling, expressed later ex camera, was that such a pronouncement was premature, as each of them imagined contributing more to an analysis of the rise of the novel rather than attending its wake. Castle's assessment may or may not be tme, but, at the beginning ofthe twenty-first century, all of us are calendrically obliged to take stock of the work done on the novel and in novel theory, and to decide, in Lenin's favourite phrase, "what is to be done?" if there is anything more to be done. Before we can grapple with the "to be done," we have to account for the "done." Novel theory itself has a history. Too often when we read eighteenth-century novels, we read them with the welter of questions of our own epoch. To focus on what novels meant to the eighteenth century we have to pay attention to novel theory and the way it changed over the past three hundred years. Just as when we listen to Mozart or Beethoven on original instruments rather than modem ones, things sound rather different, so too when we try to imagine what novels were in the past, without the palimpsests of each generation's subsequent views, we may get a clearer picture of fiction's own progress...

Two or Three Things I Know about Setting

Two or Three Things I Know about Setting Max Byrd Aword of confession at first. Several years ago I strayed from the strict world of eighteenth-century scholarship and began to write fiction of my own. I started with "hard-boiled" crime novels about a predictably oversexed and wisecracking private detective in San Francisco. Then I moved on to more expansive and complicated thrillers with international themes and sinister, exotic locales such as Harvard Yard and Paris. And most recently, I have been writing historical novels about the American past, the first of which treated a few years in the life of the philosophe Thomas Jefferson. (I resist the temptation to describe this as progress from hard-boiled to egghead.) Not completely to my surprise, writing fiction has dramatically changed the way I teach the eighteenth-century novel, and also changed the kind of scholarly criticism that I assign to students or read myself. (I am in entire agreement with Johnson's observation that "theory" is "speculation by those unversed in practice.") But one thing that has not changed is my admiration for Ian Watt's The Rise ofthe Novel, which seems to me still the definitive account of its subject. I like especially the fact that, for all its impressive historical and sociological learning, The Rise of the Novel is a highly literary book, by which I mean that it is chiefly concerned with matters such as plot and character, the topics in my experience that EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 12, Number 2-3, January-April 2000 186 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION working novelists and editors are chiefly concerned with, not to mention readers. And I find absolutely true and right Watt's central argument that the "defining characteristic" of the novel is "the individual apprehension of reality."1 Or to put it another way, the novelist is in love with concrete nouns. Defoe is a novelist not so much because of his myth-making powers or his ability to project himself psychologically into his narrator, but largely because his mind turns constantly and automatically, as he writes, to the names ofphysical objects (open any page ofRobinson Crusoe). Carol Houlihan Flynn sees the great white feather bed that Moll Flanders tosses from a burning house as a complicated symbol of death, "physical and spiritual loneliness," and "the weight of sexuality"; but really Defoe is not much given to symbols like that—the white feather bed is simply there, like Jay Gatsby's cascade of beautiful silk shirts, because a novelist's imagination fastens with greatest delight onto things, not concepts.2 A careful reader can see the exact moment when Tristram Shandy changes from being a rather vague and undefined ecclesiastical burlesque into a novel—it is the moment in chapter 21, volume 1, when Walter Shandy's wandering attention pauses to focus on "my uncle Toby's" "new pair of black-plushbreeches ," and the real, literal, authentic world of what historians call "material history" suddenly falls like a rock into the story. This sense of material history is nowhere stronger than in the presentation of "setting" in a novel. Watt uses the term "space" (as "the necessary correlative" of "time") and remarks on the indifference to realistic time and space in earlier writers such as Sidney and Shakespeare. The picaresque novel of the late seventeenth century, he concedes, has incidental descriptions of realistic settings. But "Defoe would seem to be the first of our writers who visualized the whole of his narrative as though it occurred in an actual physical environment." (Which is exactly how a novelist works, with the scene unrolling like a strip of film in his head; alternatively , Ford Madox Ford advises the beginner to "write as if the action of your novel were taking place before your eyes on a brightly lit stage.")3 This discovery of setting as an element of craft is for me one of the most interesting events in the rise of the novel. From Defoe's tenacious 1 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1964), pp. 10, 15. 2 Carol Houlihan Flynn, The Body in...

Personal Effects and Sentimental Fictions

Personal Effects and Sentimental Fictions Deidre Lynch Sentimental novels are cluttered with things. The emotional attachments that people form with possessions in these mid-eighteenth-century fictions can seem as freighted with consequence as the emotional attachments that people form with each other. Indeed, modem readers of Henry Brooke's The Fool ofQuality or Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey might be pardoned for finding it hard to distinguish one sort of relationship from the other—even if normal notions of the folly of fetishism predispose us to believe that the difference between, say, ownership and friendship is a difference worth preserving. The keepsakes that clutter sentimental fiction (the lockets that protagonists wear next to their hearts; the sleeve buttons or snuffboxes that pairs of characters exchange to memorialize their first meeting or last, teary-eyed parting) work instead to collapse that difference. While they instructed their readers in emotional responsiveness, sentimentalists were more than ready to make objects of this variety—objects particularly valued because they are the surrogates for particular persons—their props. This practice marks the novelists' fashion-consciousness. On the testimony of the OED, which dates the word keepsake to 1790, it was only in the eighteenth century that keepsakes came to be identified as a distinct kind of material good. The fact that by 1790 members ofthe propertied classes had learned to want to give and to receive keepsakes from one another bespeaks the reciprocal influence EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 12, Number 2-3, January-April 2000 346 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION between eighteenth-century people's love affair with feelings, and their fascination with the new opportunities for acquisitiveness that they discovered in shops. And that new readiness to countenance superfluous expenditure that historians of this century's "consumer revolution" have recognized— people's new willingness to disregard the traditional association between luxury and vice and instead value the luxury good as a vehicle for the finer feelings—also lies behind the marketability throughout the era of a literature designed to procure for its readers the "luxury of tears."1 Writers such as Henry Brooke, Laurence Steme, Henry Mackenzie, and Sarah Scott vindicated the psychology of refinement suitable to the new consumer culture not only by finding increasingly nuanced ways of discriminating human emotions, but also by exemplifying the diversity of the portable properties that humans might feel emotional with or about. Hence the clutter. Sensibility is both the capacity to feel as others do and, as one eighteenth-century definition maintains, that "peculiar ... habitude of mind, which disposes a man to be easily moved, and powerfully affected by surrounding objects."2 The (only semi-) satiric imitator of Sterne who takes a "Sentimental Journey from Islington to Waterloo Bridge" knows he should let nothing (no thing) "escape" him: "The traveller ... should extract reflections out of a cabbage stump." Satirists were quick to note that sentimentalism invited people to be (in the standard phrase) "tremblingly alive" to dead matter.3 Such satires of sentimental animism had a point. A carriage for hire that sits alone and "unpitied" in an inn yard in Calais is able to arouse in Sterne's Parson Yorick the sense ofobligation he had been unable to muster in his earlier encounter with the Franciscan friar. "Much indeed was not to be said for it—but something might—and when a few words will rescue misery out of her distress, I hate the man who can be a churl of them."4 It seems apt that Yorick's piteous words acknowledge his obligation to a désobligeant—that they personify a carriage that seats one person only. It is as if the communicative and emotive powers that sentimentalism 1 On sensibility and consumer culture see G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture ofSensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 2 "Question: Ought Sensibility to be Cherished or Repressed?" Monthly Magazine 2 (October 1796), quoted in Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 5. 3 Thomas Hood, "A Sentimental Journey from Islington to Waterloo Bridge," first published in the London Magazine, 1821; reprinted in Sterne...

Serious Reflections on Daniel Defoe (with an Excursus on the Farther Adventures of Ian Watt and Two Notes on the Present State of Literary Studies)

Serious Reflections on Daniel Defoe (with an Excursus on the Farther Adventures of Ian Watt and Two Notes on the Present State of Literary Studies) J. Paul Hunter Daniel Defoe—we keep saying, generation after generation—is notthe man we took him for. People said it in his lifetime, as his activities and career unfolded in loose and unpredicted ways, and, over the centuries since, new Defoes keep emerging as readers find faces and minds that earlier readings and commentators had not prepared them for. Friends say it, or former friends, or those who believed they shared views and values with him, and so do foes or those who have been pushed to confront his restless and ambitious mind andpursue itin new andunexpected directions. The process of redefining Defoe—of trying to find some unpeeled self at the core ofa project or text—has been vexed overthe years by many things: the canon wars, the redefinition ofwhat counts as literary, the reconfiguring of disciplinarities, and the foibles of intellectual and moral fashion. Trying to find the "real" Daniel Defoe has been a lot like the process of trying to trace a stable idea of selfhood itself in Western thought: we have not always known when we have found a new development or a genuinely changed perspective, and we have not always known exactly what it was we were looking for. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 12, Number 2-3, January-April 2000 228 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Different as he may seem now from the homo economicus of Ian Watt or the Mr Everytext of John Robert Moore, the present Defoe seems more robust and durable than ever. His current high esteem relative to other more strictly belletristic eighteenth-century writers says much about the depth of changes that have occurred in literary and historical studies, changes that could be represented in terms of gender, genre, ideology, thematics, or quite a few other ways. I will settle for just one representation. When Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel appeared forty-three years ago, eighteenthcentury literature was prominent in the curriculum in most of the major research universities in the English-speaking world, but the distinguished professors who taught it did their research on Johnson, Pope, or Swift (or occasionally drama) rather than on novels or other upstart genres. Lots of very good people worked on novels in those years—James Sutherland and Alan McKillop, for example—but you did not get to be George Sherburn, Bertrand Bronson, R.S. Crane, EW. Bateson, Louis Landa, John Butt, or Maynard Mack by doing so, not even if you were Ian Watt. F I once had a colleague who repeatedly enlivened job interviews by asking candidates what academic book they would most like to rewrite and how they would do it. It brought out the best in some candidates (not in others), but I was always intrigued by its implications of contextual more than authorial difference, and this essay actually began in what I now regard as a misguided attempt to rethink what I tried to do in my first book half a lifetime ago, a would-be Reluctant Pilgrim's Progress. I say "misguided" because I came to see that, although I had accumulated a long list of omissions, complaints, and mistaken assumptions to correct, you cannot simply take a book conceived in one moment and wrench it into another without confronting how the whole river, the whole underlying set of critical and philosophical and cultural assumptions, has changed. So for better and worse my early work on Defoe is going to have to continue to shift for itself in its own inadequate 1 966 assumptions rather than my present inadequate assumptions. Instead, what I want to do here is return to thinking about Defoe by asking how we are now able, in the present set of critical, historical, and intellectual circumstances more generally, to confront him differently. In effect I want to ask what some of the directions of scholarship for Defoe might consist in for the immediate future. And to do that, I have reconfronted an old model and nemesis, Watt's The Rise of the Novel, a book that...

Gendered Cultural Criticism and the Rise of the Novel: The Case of Defoe

Gendered Cultural Criticism and the Rise of the Novel: The Case of Defoe Maximillian E. Novak Let me begin by saying that I am writing as à defender of Defoe's place in what has sometimes been called "the rise ofthe novel." A few years ago, at a meeting of the Western Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, I heard a diatribe against Defoe and his creation Moll Flanders as an example of male usurpation. By assuming the voice of a female narrator, so the argument went, Defoe had insulted women in general. The work was not so much writing as ventriloquism, and Defoe was simply exploiting the character of Moll and womankind to make money and for some obscure nefarious purposes. This attack resembled, but went far beyond, the accusations against Defoe in Madeleine Kahn's Narrative Transvestism ; Defoe's writing amounted to narrative villainy.1 Shortly thereafter, I read a book which advocated replacing Robinson Crusoe with what was apparently a much more satisfying work—Charles Martin's Passages from Friday—that is, replacing a book that has maintained an audience throughout the world for 280 years with a work having a more appropriate message for us. Who, after all, would want to read a work that is clearly prejudiced against cannibals and opposed to vegetarian principles (among 1 Madeleine Kahn, Narrative Transvestism: Rhetoric and Gender in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). Kahn's section on Defoe (pp. 57-102) concentrates on reminding us that Defoe is always the masculine creator behind Moll Flanders and Roxana and that his position as a writer is manipulative. The notion that Defoe experienced both "fear and envy" in assuming the voices of these characters is extremely interesting. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 12, Number 2-3, January-April 2000 240 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION the charges levelled against Crusoe were that he eats the goats on his island and appears to feel a distinct dislike for the Caribs who use what he had come to think of as his island for the purpose of devouring the natives of other tribes)? That the cannibals would most willingly hack his body into pieces with their wooden swords and indeed, eventually, engage in an attack upon the nascent colony in The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe is not seen as an excuse. What is most at issue here is the vicious mind of the colonialist which must be castigated against all common sense.2 The basic notion behind this attack appears to be that there is no real value in Robinson Crusoe as a work of literature, that only the myth is interesting, and that we have the right to select a version of the myth that better suits our modern mind-set. Michel Tournier's Vendredi and J.M. Coetzee's Foe are not to be seen as wonderful commentaries on Defoe's original, through which we can measure the ideas ofthe eighteenth century with those of our own, but rather as salubrious replacements for a flawed view of the world.3 Some scholars are dropping Defoe from discussions of the novel. That Margaret Anne Doody's The True Story of the Novel (1996) mentions Defoe a scant three times strikes me as an historical aberration in a work claiming to offer a "true" history of the novel. How comfortable should we feel about replacing the realities of literary history and criticism with autobiographical fantasies?4 Similarly, William Beatty Warner's Licensing Entertainment, while denying any counter-hegemonic intentions, clearly wants to replace the usual Defoe-Richardson-Fielding paradigm for the origins ofthe novel with a Behn-Manley-Haywood-Richardson-Fielding pattern.5 2 Patrick J. Keane, Coleridge's Submerged Politics: The Ancient Mariner and Robinson Crusoe (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994). See esp, pp. 117-23 on Martin's Passages from Friday; and Charles Martin, Passagesfrom Friday, in Steal the Bacon (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 21-50. 3 Notable as these works are, they lack the combination of creativity and imagination that made Robinson Crusoe an inspirational work for Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Vincent Van Gogh. 4 Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story ofthe...

Did You Say Middle Class?: The Question of Taste and the Rise of the Novel

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 Question of Beginnings

A Question of Beginnings Robert B. Alter The durability of The Rise ofthe Novel among works of literary scholarship is altogether remarkable. Before long, half a century will have elapsed since its initial publication and more time than that has already passed since Ian Watt completed his first draft in 1947. Disagreements with the perspective of the book on the novel began as early as its first reviews , the central one being that Watt's concentration on what he called "the realism of presentation" gave short shrift to other kinds of realism, or to trends in the novel not easily identifiable with realism. Nobody has summarized these objections more succinctly and more wittily than Watt himself. In an essay wryly entitled "Serious Reflections on The Rise of the Novel," published a decade after the appearance of the book, Watt explains that by cutting three concluding chapters on Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne, he ended up tipping the balance in his account of the genre more than he would have liked: "As a result I have had to grow accustomed to figuring in some minds as a permanent picketerfor the Union Novel (International President H. James), carrying a sign which reads 'Cervantes Go Home' on one side and 'Fielding is a Fink' on the other."1 Watt of course cannot avoid taking responsibility for the final form of his own book, in which the reader's "belief in the reality of report" is seen as the novelistic trait par excellence, and any "patent selectiveness of vision" by 1 Ian Watt, "Serious Reflections on The Rise of the Novel," Towards a Poetics of Fiction: Essays from "Novel," a Forum on Fiction 1967-1976, ed. Mark Spilka (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1977), p. 92. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 12, Number 2-3, January-April 2000 214 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION undermining that belief or deflecting "attention from the content of the report to the skill of the reporter,"2 ultimately goes against the grain of the genre. The issues involved in this judgment are still worth debating, but it should be said that Watt is so finely intelligent, such a shrewdly informed reader of novels in their dense contexts of social and intellectual history, that his somewhat tilted perspective proves to be far less a detriment than one would have imagined. Despite its one-sidedness, The Rise ofthe Novel remains the most illuminating account we have of the emergence of the new genre in eighteenth-century England. After all these years, it still conveys a sense of the excitement of intellectual discovery. It is scarcely necessary to say that a whole series of new waves have swept through literary studies since the publication of The Rise of the Novel. In their wake, many would be inclined to conclude that Watt's study is now superannuated, hopelessly parochial in its exclusive focus on eighteenth-century England and on three canonical white male writers. Watt tried to defend himself in "Serious Reflections" against the early harbingers of such objections by pointing out that his book was, after all, subtitled "Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding." Nevertheless, the use of the definite article before "Novel" in the title proper was a little misleading: although Watt was undertaking an ostensibly delimited investigation of a new trend in English prose narrative between 1719 and 1749, both his title and many ofthe terms ofhis analysis made larger claims about the nature of the novel. Critics who saw the novel rising elsewhere and earlier were also likely to have somewhat different views about the defining characteristics of the genre. If, for example, Cervantes, instead of being invited to go home, was assumed to be the central innovator of the new genre, as Harry Levin, Marthe Robert, and a host of other critics have plausibly argued, then the confrontation between reading and living, the problematic of fiction-making, would be the pre-eminent novelistic concern, and not the realism of presentation. If La Princesse de Clèves was taken as the point of departure for the genre, then the minute analysis of feeling, the nuanced narrative embodiment of moral dilemma, would be the distinctive novelistic concerns, necessitating certain characteristic narrative procedures...

Watt's Rise of the Novel within the Tradition of the Rise of the Novel

Watt's Rise ofthe Novel within the Tradition of the Rise Of the NovelMichael McKeon When Ian Watt's The Rise ofthe Novel was first published in 1957, it was recognizably a distinctive contribution to an already existent tradition of scholarship. By this I mean the scholarly effort to understand the novel not simply through the lens of an empirical literary history, or through the lens of an abstract literary theory, but through a method in which history and theory join together to inform each other. For this tradition of scholarship, to understand the novel required establishing an idea of the coherence of the novel genre as an historical phenomenon. To be "coherent" in these terms requires that the novel fulfil the demands that pertain to all historical things: namely, that it display both the continuity of an integral entity and, within thatcontinuity, the discontinuity that confirms its existence over time and space, its capacity to change without changing into something else. The study of genre is both a theoretical and an historical enterprise that conceives literary categories in their contingency. Understood as integral structures, genres have a temporal and spatial existence that defines the scope of their identity; understood as parts of greater wholes, genres have a structural existence in relation to other integral formations. That is, genres are formal structures that have an historical existence in the sense that they come into being, flourish, and decay, waxing and waning in complex relationship to other historical phenomena. Genres are contingent in the sense that they are not necessary: neither their nature nor their transformation , neithertheircontinuity northeirdiscontinuity, canbe predicated in advance. This distinguishes genres from "modes" or "universals." Aristotle is the source for our division of literary discourse into the three basic EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 12, Number 2-3, January-April 2000 254 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION categories "lyric," "drama," and "narrative."1 These three modes are basic in that they purport to cover the logical range of possibility: for the poet may either speak in a single voice, or represent two or more voices in dialogue, oralternate between these two modes. Whereas genres are contingent and conventional, modes are "necessary" or "natural," an inescapable consequence of discourse itself. For the scholarly tradition in which Watt participates, establishing the generic coherence ofthe novel in particularhas its own special interest. This is becausethe novel is, with the essay, the only genre to have emergedunder the conditions of epistemological and historiographie self-consciousness that characterize the modern period. All genres, presumably, have had their "rise." But to account for "the rise of the novel" is a peculiarly compelling project because unlike the origins of the classical genres, which are lost in the mists of time, the rise of the novel is at least putatively accessible to full scholarly view. Indeed, for this tradition of scholarship the novel is the quintessentially modern genre, deeply intertwined with the historicity of the modern period, of modernity itself. In the following pages I will provide a brief account of what I take to be common in and central to the thought of three of Watt's predecessors as they define a tradition of novel scholarship: Georg Lukács, José Ortega y Gasset, and Mikhail M. Bakhtin. I will then turn to the ways in which The Rise of the Novel does and does not participate in this tradition, and conclude with some reflections on the relevance of this account to the fortunes of novel studies since Watt's book first appeared. A halfcentury after its publication, Georg Lukács looked back on The Theory ofthe Novel (1920) as a youthful effusion whose pre-Marxist excesses were deeply coloured by the imminent outbreak of the Great War. Written in draft in 1914, it was first published in Max Dessoir's journal Zeitschrift für Aesthetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft in 1916. Its subtitle—A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature— suggests the author's theoretical and historical ambitions. Lukács understood his task to require the discrimination of the novel, as a modern form, from the founding Western narrative genre, the epic. "The novel is the epic of an age in which the extensive...

"Where the World May Ne'er Invade"?: Green Retreats and Garden Theatre in La Princesse de Clèves, The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless , and Cecilia

"Where the World May Ne'er Invade"? Green Retreats and Garden Theatre in La Princesse de Clèves, The History ofMiss Betsy Thoughtless, and Cecilia J. David Macey, Jr Give me O indulgent Fate! Give me, yet, before I Dye, A sweet, but absolute Retreat, 'Mongst Paths so lost, and Trees so high, That the World may ne'er invade, Through such Windings and such Shade, My unshaken Liberty.1 The speaker in Anne Finch's poem "The Petition for an Absolute Retreat " (1713) expresses her desire for "A sweet, but absolute Retreat," and she locates this retreat out of doors, in a retired and inaccessible corner of a grove where unwelcome visitors will be unable to infringe on her "unshaken Liberty." Finch is not alone in her desire for a green retreat: the gardening mania that gripped England during the eighteenth century bears witness to the widespread appeal of gardens, groves, and wildernesses as sites of recreation and spiritual renewal. Novelists pay tribute to the ideal of rural retirement celebrated in Finch's poem when they represent their heroes or, more frequently, their heroines retiring to bowers in 1 Anne Kingsmill Finch, Countess ofWinchilsea, "The Petition for an Absolute Retreat," The Poems ofAnne Countess ofWinchilsea, ed. Myra Reynolds, The Decennial Publications ofthe University of Chicago, 2nd series, vol. 5 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1903), pp. 68-69, lines 1-7. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 12, Number 1, October 1999 76 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION lovely and lonely gardens in order to reflect on the tumultuous events that shape their careers. The secluded garden seat provides these heroines with a place in which to express feelings, either alone or to a privileged confidant , that would invite censure were the heroines to acknowledge them in public. Richardson's Clarissa, for example, seeks respite from the oppressive atmosphere of Harlowe Place—and finds means to conduct a clandestine correspondence with her beloved Anna Howe—in her father's "rambling, Dutch-taste garden," and she dreams of escaping from her tyrannical family and retiring to the rural "dairy-house" that her grandfather erected for her use.2 As Clarissa learns, however, the garden at Harlowe Place is far from an absolute retreat, and more than a few other eighteenthcentury heroines make the same discovery about the gardens to which they retire in moments of crisis. Lovelace is not the only villain—or hero— in eighteenth-century fiction who possesses a key to the heroine's garden gate: again and again, heroines are taken by surprise by intruders after retiring to gardens in order to be alone. Some of these surprises effect éclaircissements that facilitate the heroines' marriages, while others, including Clarissa's, have disastrous consequences. Whether happy or fatal, these conventional scenes of discovery suggest the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of securing the perfect and "unshaken Liberty" that Finch associates with the possession of an "absolute Retreat." One version of this discovery scene derives from Mme de La Fayette's novel La Princesse de Clèves (1678). In La Princesse de Clèves, the heroine retires to a pavilion or "bower" in the garden ofher château at Coulommiers in order to contemplate a portrait of her beloved would-be lover, the Duc de Nemours. Nemours, who has penetrated the Princess's maze-like garden, observes her and recognizes himselfas the object ofher affectionate regard, butthe Princess, when she realizes thatNemours is watching her, withdraws from view. The remainder of La Fayette's novel describes the Princess's search for and eventual discovery of a more secure retreat in which she will be able to indulge both her passion and her melancholy without exciting malicious gossip or inviting the unwelcome advances of a lover whom she feels duty-bound not to marry. The scene in the bower at Coulommiers marks an important turning point in the Princess's relationship to Nemours, and it anticipates her decision, at the end of the novel, to turn her back on Nemours and the court in order to seek, in the seclusion of an "absolute Retreat," a degree ofpersonal freedom impossible in the conspiratorial and sexually charged environment of the French court. Eliza Fowler Haywood 2...

Commerce, Morality and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (review)

REVIEWS 109 the chronology of Fielding's life and the annotated bibliography of primary and secondary sources. As an added bonus, the edition includes four reproductions of Thomas Stothard's illustrations to the 1782 Novelist's Magazine edition, one engraved by the young William Blake. Readers of eighteenth-century fiction will be delighted that Sarah Fielding's edition has been restored in a volume that is accessible, responsibly edited, and handsomely produced. Christopher D. Johnson Francis Marion University Liz Bellamy. Commerce, Morality and the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. vii + 233pp. US$59.95. ISBN 0-521-62224-7. In Commerce, Morality and the Eighteenth-Century Novel, Liz Bellamy argues that civic humanism, bourgeois economics, and moral philosophy constitute an unsettled ideological mix that novels continually try to sort out as the eighteenth century proceeds. The difficulty with Bellamy's text is that its thesis develops at so high a level ofgeneralization that terms such as "economics" continually confront the reader without adequate intellectual underpinning. Sometimes economics is seen as feminizing when compared to the brute masculinity ofepic; at other times as suppressing the feminine with overbearing patriarchalism. Moreover, while the thesis is illustrated through a series of novels, one is never quite sure whether such novels constitute a coherent discourse or are merely scattered, coincidental shots aimed at a moving target. Even if ideology were unsettled along the lines suggested by Bellamy, she has not proved that novels really try to sort out or even register this unsettlement in a systematic, deliberate way, or even in unconscious ways that can be convincingly demonstrated. Of course novels are about struggle and tension—when have they not been? Bellamy makes claims that are often facile, as if her generalizations did not require adequate analysis of subject texts. Speaking of Tom Jones, for example, she asserts that "by repeatedly suggesting the absence of a consensus in the interpretation of the novel, despite the presence of the narrator, it creates an impression of the absence ofa unifying ideology within society" (p. 94). Does it? Anyone familiar with Fielding criticism could offer several reasons for the cognitive tug-of-war between narrator and reader. Speaking of Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison, Bellamy notes that while the hero is respectable, he fails to merit the praise he receives, and she ascribes this disjunction to a "cultural uncertainty over the definition of male virtue" that is over-simplified and radically inaccurate: "the epic concept of heroism and public endeavour was being undermined by the emergence of economic analysis, with its denial of the importance of any kind of civic humanist notion of the public, and its elevation not only of private and domestic virtue, but also of mercenary acquisitiveness" (p. 108). Who among eighteenthcentury economists counselled "mercenary acquisitiveness"? Certainly not Adam 110 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 12:1 Smith, whom Bellamy examines as a pivotal figure. Moreover, the type of "civic humanism" that we have come to understand through the writings ofJ.G.A. Pocock stood in opposition to certain forms of mobile wealth attained through speculation and enterprises unassociated with traditional landed concerns. As Pocock has shown, it did not necessarily oppose the market economy in all its forms. BeIlany 's argument here is another instance of the unstable, insufficiently explained categories that drive the reader to say "Now wait a minute...!" There are so many such instances that they continually detract from the case that Bellamy is attempting to make, since they signal to the specialist that Bellamy's analysis is superficial. Speaking ofa visit to the Royal Exchange in Sarah Fielding's David Simple, Bellamy observes that it provides the occasion for a set-piece, "a satirical portrayal of the debased and corrupted values of the contemporary financial system, in a style which was familiar from periodicals such as Daniel Defoe's Review or the Spectator" (p. 133). If anything is characteristic of the Review, it is that Defoe said as many wonderful things about "credit" and the necessity for well-run markets as he said adverse things about jobbery and AirMoney . Lady Credit epitomizes Defoe's love-hate relationship with the financial system, which persisted throughout his...

Clarissa Harlowe, Mary Astell, and Elizabeth Carter: John Norris of Bemerton's Female "Descendants"

Clarissa Harlowe, Mary Astell, and Elizabeth Carter: John Norris of Bemerton's Female "Descendants" Derek Taylor Had Samuel Richardson wanted only erudite ornamentation for Clarissa, he certainly could have gone to a less troublesome source than the learned Elizabeth Carter's "Ode to Wisdom"; as it was, he went to a greatdealoftrouble—and got afair amountofit in return—to include this particular poem in his masterpiece. The story of Richardson's breach of publishing ethics can be found, among other places, in T.C. Duncan Eaves and Ben Kimpel's SamuelRichardson:A Biography. As they relate it, after the first two volumes of Clarissa were released in 1747 (Clarissa, now a virtual prisoner in Harlowe Place, includes the Ode and her music for its last stanzas in her letter of 24 March to Anna Howe), Carter wrote to Richardson , complaining that "to print any thing without the consent of the person who wrote it, is a proceeding so very ungenerous and unworthy of a man of reputation, that, from the character I have heard of you, I am utterly at a loss how to account for it."1 Richardson immediately sent Carter an exculpatory explanation: he had included the Ode despite having a "redundancy of material" because it answered both his need for excellent supplementary 1 TC. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 214-15. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 12, Number 1, October 1999 20 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION material "from our best Poets" and, since he knew it was "by a lady," his desire to "do honour to the sex." He could not discover the author, but did not credit Clarissa with writing it. He had gone to great expense "by setting it to musick" and by having it "engraved and wrought highly," thus distinguishing the piece within his novel. Richardson's letter, the biographers note, had its intended effect: Carter wrote to Catherine Talbot that she had "received so civil an answer ... that [she] knew not how to be angry with him" (p. 215). But while Eaves and Kimpel's sketch of the events surrounding the "borrowing" allows little more than anecdotal significance to this episode, there is a good deal of evidence, both in Clarissa and in these surrounding events, to suggest that this particular moment in the composition of Clarissa deserves closer inspection. The biographers, for instance, quite rightly connect Richardson's claim that his aim in printing the Ode was to "do honour to the sex" with his knowledge that its author was a woman. Clarissa too believes that the Ode "does honour to our sex, as it was written by one of it."2 But where the biographers leave off, Clarissa continues. The Ode, she suggests, is "not unsuitable to my unhappy situation"; the final three stanzas, she writes, "were my lesson." In other words, for Clarissa, the importance of the Ode derives not only from its author's sex but from what it says to Clarissa, what it teaches a woman much put upon, as well. Just what "lesson" would Clarissa have received from Carter's poem? It is perhaps not one we would have expected in a novel so often thought to support some version of the Lockean claim that "truth can be discovered by the individual through his senses."3 But then Richardson was perhaps not so complete a follower of Locke as is often assumed.4 2 Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, or The History afa Young Lady, ed. Angus Ross (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 231. References are to this edition unless otherwise noted. 3 Ian Watt, The Rise ofthe Novel (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1960), p. 12. Locke's influence on Richardson's novels, according to Watt, can safely be assumed, for his "thought everywhere pervades the eighteenth-century climate of opinion" (p. 31). 4 Jocelyn Harris argues for Locke's philosophical influence on Richardson. See "Richardson: Original or Learned Genius?" in Samuel Richardson: Tercentenary Essays, ed. Margaret Anne Doody and Peter Sabor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 188-202. Yet, after opening a paragraph by contending that "among more secular English philosophical works, Richardson seems...