Reviewed by: The Rise of Autobiography in the Eighteenth Century: Ten Experiments in Literary Genre—Augustine, Bunyan, Rousseau, Locke, Hume, Franklin, Gibbon, Sterne, Fielding, Boswell by Robert H. Bell Christopher D. Johnson Robert H. Bell. The Rise of Autobiography in the Eighteenth Century: Ten Experiments in Literary Genre—Augustine, Bunyan, Rousseau, Locke, Hume, Franklin, Gibbon, Sterne, Fielding, Boswell. Lewiston, NY; Mellen, 2012. Pp. vii + 278. $139.95. Noting that “the spiritual origins and aspects of secular life stories are crucial,” Mr. Bell traces the development of early modern autobiography. As the eighteenth century progressed, narratives emphasizing Christian teleology, such as Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, transformed under the pressures of an increasingly empirical culture. “Enlightenment autobiographers like Franklin,” Mr. Bell argues, “were situated in an epoch when spiritual premises were losing purchase and secular assumptions gaining traction.” To Mr. Bell’s credit, he does not attempt to chart this transformation as a clean, linear progression. Instead, he finds within the narratives abundant tension and occasional misdirection as the authors struggle with various understandings of experience and identity. In chapter one, Augustine’s Confessions becomes the touchstone for Christian conversion narrative. Within this work, Mr. Bell finds two features that will not survive the eighteenth century. The first is a subordination of detail to narrative arc. While for Augustine, “mundane facts count only when they signify spiritual realities,” later writers, reflecting their more inductive culture, pay greater attention to the particularities of daily living. The second is the fundamental Christian journey from sinfulness toward redemption. As the century progresses, this pattern reverses into the familiar Romantic story of lost innocence. In elaborating these ideas, Mr. Bell points initially to Bunyan and Defoe. The former largely follows the model of Augustine; the latter pushes in new directions. Moll Flanders, for example, “faintly but discernibly adumbrates the Enlightenment ideal of individual mastery” by providing readers a protagonist who “neither repudiates worldly things nor affirms spiritual imperatives.” Mr. Bell then moves to Rousseau’s Confessions, where the abandonment of “any pretense of narrative control” reflects the “painful chaos” of a life “proceeding haphazardly.” Unable to discover [End Page 64] a providential purpose, Rousseau “invents a new justification for personal narrative” by becoming a “prophet of sincerity.” As writers move away from the Augustinian paradigm, the self becomes “understood as subjective and represented as contingent.” In the second chapter, Mr. Bell discusses the philosophical assumptions that account for this change, with Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, unsurprisingly, adduced as a pivotal text: “After Locke, selfhood is generally and increasingly conceived in temporal and experiential terms, as a construction of individual consciousness, derived through introspection.” Two engaging readings follow: one of Hume’s My Own Life, the other of Franklin’s Autobiography. Calling attention to Franklin’s Puritan background, Mr. Bell sees the work as emblematic of the age: “Franklin’s story illustrates the metamorphosis from spiritual confession to secular self-fashioning, and represents his life as a work in progress.” Chapter three provides something of counter-narrative to chapter two. Examining Edward Gibbon’s Memoirs of My Life, Mr. Bell finds an autobiography in which childhood is largely unimportant. In place of a character shaped by experience, Gibbon posits an essential identity awaiting self-discovery, “a monumental neoclassical self, a fixed, immutable essence.” Mr. Bell then connects Gibbon’s autobiography to Tom Jones. The analysis is cogent, but one wonders if discussions of Defoe and Fielding belong in a study of autobiography. Chapter four considers Laurence Sterne’s various autobiographical personae. Much of the chapter examines Tristram Shandy, which, once again, might seem to fall outside the realm of autobiography. Mr. Bell defends his decision by noting that unlike Defoe and Richardson, “Sterne, exploiting his celebrity, regularly introduced himself as Tristram Shandy throughout the parlours, courts, and boudoirs of the great world.” Like Locke and Hume, Sterne represents “personal identity as problematic and fundamentally unknowable,” yet he also maintains an optimistic faith “in one’s ability to perceive and understand,” which links him “more closely with his contemporaries Fielding, Gibbon and Franklin than with modernist laureates of loss or postmodern advocates of absence.” The chapter becomes most interesting...
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Feb 1, 2014
Valentin Quintus Nicolescu 
Open Access