Reviewed by: The Frame of Art: Fictions of Aesthetic Experience, 1750–1815 Richard Kroll David Marshall. The Frame of Art: Fictions of Aesthetic Experience, 1750–1815. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. 260pp. US$50. ISBN-13: 978-0-8018-8233-3. The reviewer of David Marshall's latest book finds himself in a somewhat cramped position because The Frame of Art has already received a major accolade: the Louis Gottschalk Prize awarded by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. It is not hard to see why. This is the third book by this scholar addressing major aspects of later eighteenth-century life and letters, including the cult of sensibility, and the metatheatrical metaphor as a means for negotiating among individual personality, individual sensation, and the social scene. Marshall's three books thus comprise a triptych exploring a period of literary history that used to go by the moniker "pre-Romanticism." The book is conventionally and cleanly organized, laying out the larger model or problematic that occupies Marshall in the first two chapters, then engaging in some close readings (of Austen, Rousseau, Mackenzie, Lennox, and Hume) in chapters 3–7. In each chapter, Marshall demonstrates an enviable facility with the English, French, and German canon, and at points (especially chapter 3) produces close readings of difficult texts that are nothing short of a tour de force. That said, I find Marshall's title, alluding to a "frame," somewhat misleading, because what occupies the book is a conundrum central, Marshall argues, to this period. I put the problem as a question: how is it that landscapes, pictures, and other works of art seem to the reader or viewer to be all the more "natural" to the extent that they are structured not randomly but according to palpably artificial principles of the picturesque? That is, as in the classic case of English landscape design, because (we are assured) the scene is arranged according to criteria derived from the paintings of Claude or Salvator Rosa, the viewer experiences the prospect as overwhelmingly "natural," the hint of the artificial being essential to the effect, yet being entirely absorbed in it (see, for example, page 65). (The scenario is almost endlessly repeated, one might remark, in the landscape portions of Radcliffe's The Italian.) This produces a constant vacillation between what we might imagine as the ontological ground of art—the Ding an sich, as it were—and the experience of authenticity, which only comes alive in the act of representing that ground, and is now lost to us because inevitably mediated. To me, "frame" denotes something altogether more fixed, given, less purely dialectical and shifting, than what seems to occupy Marshall's attention, unless the word means merely the arena within which this special form of epistemological play takes place: according to Marshall himself, the dynamic tends to eradicate the "boundaries" between nature and art (39). Marshall has unquestionably captured something essential about the imaginative world he describes, such that he can develop the model [End Page 364] economically by citing the usual suspects in English theories of landscape and the picturesque in the course of the eighteenth century—undoubtedly the canon of which the artless Catherine knows nothing in Northanger Abbey. The second chapter broadens the scope of analysis to the Continent, for by discussing Kames and Pope, Marshall can also summon Du Bos and Lessing, to show how the problem of audience identification with the subject of representation is also a subset of the topos, ut pictura poesis: by paradoxically admitting that the subject is represented, Kames, for example, can act as if it were immediately apprehensible, translated into an ideal presence (44). It thus transpires that Mansfield Park is a meditation on the way that personality and experience have to be understood dramatistically (as Kenneth Burke puts it), so that Fanny exemplifies the paradoxical space between being spectator and actor herself: the crisis of the novel occurs when the Crawfords "call into question Fanny's understanding of the roles of player and spectator" (75). In this, the most successful of Marshall's readings, the play between mediation and the fiction of unmediated experience translates into a narratological principle, whereby the...