Book Reviews/ - Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Book Reviews/
Critiques de livres
English and British Fiction 1750–1820 (vol. 2, The Oxford History
of the Novel in English), ed. Peter Garside and Karen O’Brien
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
700pp. £95. ISBN 978-0-19-957480-3.
Review by Marta Kvande, Texas Tech University
This volume in The Oxford History of the Novel in English series
(OHNE) occupies a particular niche in the market for collections of
essays on the novel. The large size and scope separate it from brief
collections intended primarily for students, such as the Cambridge
Companion series. With thirty-three essays packed into 630 pages,
this collection aims for both greater breadth and greater depth. The
Cambridge History of the English Novel is more comparable in size, but
that book allots a single volume to the history that the OHNE plans
to survey in twelve volumes, and of which the present volume is only
a part. Blackwell’s Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel and
Culture covers a similar time span, but as a “companion,” it has different
aims than a volume explicitly titled a “history.” Not many books on the
market, then, attempt to do what this series and this volume aim to do:
provide a comprehensive history of the novel in English that offers both
breadth of coverage and depth of study. In market terms, this volume
creates a place for itself by staking out territory different from other
available books.
The volume offers something new and valuable in terms of its content
as well. Like all the other OHNE volumes so far, it includes a group of
essays attending to the processes of production and distribution. These
essays focus on central issues in book history for the eighteenth century—
production, authorship, and circulation—topics that are crucial for
under­standing the material and therefore the literary context of the
novel during this period. The basic historical facts of book production
help us to understand what readers physically encountered when they
read novels. And the transformations in authorship (trends in named
authorship and anonymity as well as what it meant to be an “author”) and
in circulation (the emergence of circulating and subscription libraries)
had enormous effects on the history of the novel. Each essay provides
both an overview of the topic and new insights. James Raven’s essay on
“Production” notes, for example, that during the 1780s, many novels
claimed the influence of Frances Burney—far more than named Henry
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Fielding or Tobias Smollett as models. And because the volume opens with
this section, this group of essays helps to ensure a productive awareness
of the materiality of texts throughout the essays that follow. In E.J. Clery’s
essay on “The Novel in the 1750s,” for instance, the discussion of the
genre in that decade includes consideration of the state of the book trades
and the marketplace for books, including the emergence of reviewing
as a force and the importance of reprints of earlier fiction. Making such
awareness part of the analysis of the kinds of novels written and published
in the 1750s creates a fuller picture and a deeper understanding of it. In a
similar way, the section devoted to “Alternative Forms of Fiction” includes
essays that draw attention to different publishing formats and how they
shaped both what authors wrote and what readers looked for. This kind
of deeper understanding through awareness of the novel’s materiality is
one of the volume’s strengths.
This particular OHNE volume faces (as volume 1 will, when it is
published) the special challenge of dealing with a period in the novel’s
history that has often been considered to include its “rise.” Histories
of the eighteenth-century British novel have nearly always sought to
explain how and why the novel transformed itself over the course of the
century, and, as a result, these histories nearly always end up offering
a teleological and selective account. This collection employs several
strategies to avoid such a problem. One benefit of the focus of this
volume on the years 1750–1820 is that it breaks up the common focus
on the century itself and shifts the ground by doing so. Of course, a
different time span can carry the risk of merely creating an alternative
teleology. Many of these essays do find it hard to resist the gravitational
pull of Walter Scott, given his great significance for the history of the
novel and his move to the novel genre in the 1810s. But, on the whole,
the collection’s breadth and depth counters the tendency of histories
to drift towards teleology: because there are thirty-three essays, the
volume can examine a significant number of trends and varieties of
fiction as well as contexts and issues, giving attention to exactly the
kinds of things that derail a simple narrative of progress. The four
sections that follow the first are mostly arranged in decreasing order of
significance and magnitude: “Major Authors and Traditions,” “Generic
Variations and Narrative Structures,” “Contexts,” and “Alternative
Forms of Fiction.” The “Major Authors and Traditions” section gathers
fourteen essays, with ten focusing on subgenres. The remaining four
essays are devoted to the authors that the editors consider major in
this period: Smollett, Laurence Sterne, Jane Austen, and Scott. Given
that Raven’s essay points out the impact Burney had in this period, it
is surprising that she was not given an essay to herself (although she
does appear in Betty Schellenberg’s excellent essay on “Bluestocking
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Women and Rational Female Fiction” and is mentioned elsewhere too).
Smollett’s return to the foreground is evidently made possible by the
collection’s particular scope and coverage, and the inclusion of ramble
fiction alongside his work brings an enormously popular (though often
neglected) group of novels back into our picture of the eighteenthcentury novel and of readers’ tastes. Other subgenres that used to be
considered outside the mainstream of the history of the novel also get
brought forward, such as the national tale. Even when this group of
essays deals with the usual suspects, there is greater nuance, with essays
considering early and later novels of sensibility, as well as early and later
gothic novels. Deidre Lynch’s essay on “Early Gothic Novels and the
Belief in Fiction” illustrates why this is important. Noting that gothic
has always been understood to run counter to the novelistic tradition
of realism, Lynch argues that early gothic actually trained readers in
how to read all types of fiction, thereby supporting traditions it has
been thought to problematize. Similarly, the group of three essays
beginning with “Sentimental Fiction of the 1760s and 1770s,” con­
tinuing with “Bluestocking Women and Rational Female Fiction,”
through “The Novel of Sensibility in the 1780s” nicely complicates the
idea of sensibility as dominating the fiction of these years by situating
rational fiction by women right in the middle of sentiment. This section
(like the rest of the collection) effectively reminds us that the novel is
a capacious and complicated genre that cannot be reduced to a simple
linear narrative.
Importantly, however, the result is not a fragmented collection of
essays on disparate topics. Sometimes, as just noted, it is the sequence
of essays that produces suggestive and intriguing connections. At
other times, connections become apparent because texts and topics
keep popping up in different essays. To no one’s surprise, Scott war­
rants mention in twenty-one of the essays (not counting the piece
specifically focused on him), whether as author, reviewer, editor, or
reader. And many of the essays (as already mentioned) make good
use of book-historical scholarship to deepen their analysis. Gender,
too, is present throughout the essays, as are women writers, rather
than being cordoned off in one or two essays. For instance, several of
the contributors mention it-narratives, ramble novels, and epistolary
fiction, even though each of those is the subject of a separate essay.
Lynn Festa, for example, points out that it-narratives, while ostensibly
aimed at creating sympathy for the nonhuman, often demonstrate
human inhumanity instead; she uses this point to pick up a broader
theme—the ways in which novels do or do not foster the broadening of
the readers’ imagination, whether to other nations, other individuals,
other times, or other peoples. These smaller connections are the more
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interesting ones to follow through the book, as they hint at less wellknown currents in the history of the novel in this period. It is worth
reading the volume straight through, rather than selecting an essay here
and there to dip into.
The collection saves its most tendentious essay for last: Clifford
Siskin’s “The Rise of the ‘Rise’ of the Novel.” Yet, in spite of that
approach, its claims feel quite natural coming at the end of this series
of essays. Suggesting “emergence” as a more useful term than “rise” to
describe the genre’s history, especially in the context of scholarship that
highlights new data and a multitude of texts, Siskin brings in the idea
of “novelism” from his earlier work to argue that it was this novelism—
discourse of and about the novel—that ultimately generated the idea of
Literature. It is an apt conclusion to a volume that encompasses so much.
In this book, the history of the novel looks rather like a Pieter Bruegel
the Elder painting, packed with individuals, some in the foreground
and some in the background, but all presented with great detail and all,
in their different actions, contributing to the overall effect of the image.
And it is full of life and activity. This feels right: the history of the novel
is not a unified narrative, but precisely the kind of diversified picture
presented in OHNE.
Marta Kvande is an associate professor of English at Texas Tech University,
specializing in Restoration and eighteenth-century British literature, with
particular interests in the history of the novel, women writers, and the
history of the book.
An Empire of Air and Water: Uncolonizable Space in the British
Imagination, 1750–1850 by Siobhan Carroll
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.
viii+290pp. US$59.95. ISBN 978-0-8122-4678-0.
Review by Christopher Parkes, Lakehead University
Siobahn Carroll’s An Empire of Air and Water focuses on the repre­
sentation of four kinds of atopic space in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury texts: the poles, the oceans, the atmosphere, and subterranean
caves. According to Carroll, these spaces gained a tremendous grip on
the British imagination because, as atopias, they were too inhospitable
to be properly disciplined and brought within the physical and imagina­
tive bounds of empire; they were always outside the bounds of the
nation state and the capitalist trade system. Drawing on an impressive
body of texts, including poems, novels, travel narratives, and explorers’
journals, she performs some perceptive and nuanced readings of these
four kinds of space and, in the process, produces an engaging narrative
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that captures the spirit of an age in which imperialist expansion,
technical expertise, and human will came together with the purpose of
conquering some of the most remote and vexing regions on the globe.
Carroll’s book is a fine addition to the increasing collection of studies
that demonstrate how vital eighteenth- and nineteenth-century litera­
ture was to the British public’s conception of the nation as one space. As
previous scholars have shown, the increased production of maps and
travel narratives allowed Britons to possess a more complete picture of
their geography and, in the process, allowed them to imagine the nation
as a coherent space rather than a disjointed collection of disparate
locales. At the same time the nation was being reimagined as a larger
net­work, however, there remained liminal spaces that continued to
operate as pockets of resistance, often containing romantic figures such
as gypsies, vagabonds, and highwaymen. And, later in the nineteenth
century, Britain developed a large-scale bureaucracy composed of sci­
entific experts whose job it was to impose safety and security on the
nation’s dangerous geography by, for example, cleaning up the water
supply and eradicating airborne diseases.
As a reminder that many geographies and locales remained outside
the control of the state apparatus, Carroll’s study is a necessary addition
to the larger body of scholarly texts focused on the ideological control of
space. In her chapter on polar exploration, Carroll argues that the poles
presented a wealth of imaginative possibilities because they could not
be colonized by mercantilism. She explores how the sea had the power
to disrupt the space of the ship, producing a near societal breakdown
and carnivalesque role reversals, and she reminds us that the empire’s
control over its spaces is always tenuous and threatening to unravel.
In her chapter on the atmosphere, she investigates how the rise of air
ballooning engendered in the English fears that their skies were open to
invasion from France and its more advanced aeronauts. And caves, she
notes, were often home to outlaws, and thus represented a space wherein
the social order could be challenged and reconceived. Her study then
concludes with a clever reading of the space of London, a city whose
size was, as Carroll indicates, both the result of the empire’s enormous
mercantile activity and a threat to it, rendering it (for romantic writers
at least) a space as inhospitable and atopic as the sea itself.
If there is anything to criticize about such a fine book, it might be that
it shies away from making any bold claims for itself. Such humility is
certainly to be commended, but I think that it needs a better statement
of its thesis at the outset. My sense is that the book is about the pre­
cari­ousness of empire and the ways in which atopic spaces remind
civilizations that the globe can never be completely colonized, a fact
as frightening as it is inspiring to the human imagination. While the
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book is finely detailed and subtle in its interpretations, I found myself
wanting something in the way of a grander statement of its purpose
because, given the considerable size of the archive upon which it draws
and its meticulous attention to detail, it earns the right to make bold
claims. It might also be said that the book relies too heavily on the
tried and true notion that space is often carnivalesque and, as such,
cannot be entirely controlled or disciplined by the larger social order.
This is an approach to space in eighteenth-century texts that has been
favoured by scholars for decades and has become rather too orthodox.
To be fair, Carroll’s study does contain within it suggestions of other
approaches, particularly when it strays, for example, outside the time
period under review to draw connections to nineteenth-century science
fiction, a mode of writing in which atopic space figures prominently.
This is a fascinating connection given that, in the eighteenth century,
the earth still had many unknown and unknowable spaces, areas that
were comparable to the moon for their remoteness. Framing the book
with an introduction that connects her texts to science fiction and the
work of science fiction scholars might have allowed Carroll to take her
insights in a new, more innovative direction.
What all readers will agree on, however, is that An Empire of Air
and Water is crisply written and well researched. Scholars interested in
geography and its connection to the literary imagination have been given
a useful study of four important kinds of space that undoubtedly had
and will continue to have a profound hold on the human imagination.
Christopher Parkes is an associate professor in English at Lakehead
University. He has published articles on Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding,
Charlotte Bronte, and Robert Louis Stevenson, and he is the author of
Children’s Literature and Capitalism: Fictions of Social Mobility in Britain
1850–1914 (2012).
Political Magic: British Fictions of Savagery and Sovereignty,
1650–1750 by Christopher F. Loar
New York: Fordham University Press, 2014.
xiv+326pp. US$65. ISBN 978-0-8232-5691-4.
Review by Elizabeth Kraft, University of Georgia
Christopher F. Loar’s Political Magic investigates a central trope in
fictions of colonial contact: violence as magic. The trope has significance
not only in terms of the treatment of “savage” populations, but also with
regards to the re-visioning of domestic sovereignty after the English
Civil War. While Loar notes that “after 1660 ... Britain seeks to cultivate
a political community that does not need strong applications of violence
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to keep it ordered” (4), he also demonstrates through his careful readings
of central texts that internalized response to the potential of violence
replaced (or was recommended to replace) “application.” Fictional
representations of communities of civil contract from the Restoration
through the mid-eighteenth century focus on this question: “How can
a prepolitical, uncivil person become sufficiently civil to enter into
an agreement about government?” (8) And the answer is, not without
the threat of violence or the mystification of power—alternatives that,
in the end, amount to the same thing.
Loar begins where such a discussion should begin: with the facts of
regicide, civil war, commonwealth, and restored monarchy. These are
the conditions of Restoration and early eighteenth-century literature
(and, though not as viscerally, certainly residually, of all literature of
the long eighteenth century). The writers of the time were struggling
to come to terms with new realities and reacting to unprecedented
events. Thomas Hobbes, William Davenant, William Cavendish, Duke
of Newcastle, and especially Margaret Cavendish were astute observers
and eloquent writers about the world they were living in and the one
they hoped to create. As preamble to his analysis of Cavendish’s The
Blazing World, Loar discusses Hobbes’s belief in “terror as a tool of
government” (39), Davenant’s concern that “mere physical force is an
unsteady foundation for authority” (51) without the added political use
of the aesthetics of spectacle and ceremony, and Newcastle’s advice (in
a letter to Charles ii) that “a sovereign must sustain his authority with
a violence that paves the way for more ceremonial modes of power”
inasmuch as “force and display can change human nature, creating a
polity that will obey of its own will” (49–50). Cavendish’s work, which
draws on that of Hobbes, Davenant, and Newcastle, also addresses the
question of “how a sovereign can civilize the people and make authority
visible” (58). Her answer, though, is a troubled vision of the role of
violence—especially violence enhanced by technology—in the process
of civilization. While effective in the short term, such magical displays
can have apocalyptic consequences if the sovereign governs above and
outside the law. Masculine sovereignty, in particular, is dangerous,
according to The Blazing World. Feminine sovereignty, with its emphasis
on “disinterested virtue,” is safer, “though even here ... violence may
yield a terrifying excess” (65).
In the following chapters, Loar turns to post-Restoration writers,
beginning with Aphra Behn. Focusing on Oroonoko, The Roundheads,
and The Widow Ranter, Loar investigates Behn’s presentation of the
fetishizing of political symbols of wonder, for example the burning glass
in Oroonoko or the crown jewels in The Roundheads. Behn’s writings
reveal “the implicit conflation of the savage and in rabble,” the latter
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of which is “a central concern in ... [her] work” (69), and make the
point that the sovereign needs to maintain an ironic distance from
manipulation of the people through fetish and display; otherwise, he will
be prone (as were James ii and Oroonoko) to buy into his own romance
and, therefore, to over-emphasize violence to his own destruction and
the country’s ruin.
Daniel Defoe’s Crusoe narratives do not emphasize ironic distance,
but they—especially Robinson Crusoe—develop the notion of “political
magic” as a positive tool for empire. Defoe’s fictions confront “new
forms of social and political organization” as the author “struggles to
understand how the undisciplined body and chaotic politic spaces
might be made civilized and thus capable of self-government” (105).
The answer to the first question in Defoe’s narratives is provided by
the technology of gunfire. The answer to the second question is more
problematic, as the newly civilized will inevitably imbibe notions and
strategies of control from their own civilizing process and therefore
may deploy those notions and strategies when given a chance—as
does Friday at the end of Robinson Crusoe when he taunts, tames, and
eventually kills a bear. In Loar’s persuasive and radically revisionist
interpretation of this episode, Friday is not discredited by his bearbaiting, as is usually argued. Instead, he is an exemplary parodist of
the colonial project in that he reveals and reflects the ways in which he
has been coerced into subjection by the magical violence of Robinson
Crusoe’s gun. In other words, while Defoe advocated for the colonialist
in Crusoe, he also mapped the colonial subject’s potentially problematic
appropriation of sovereign power and strategy.
Loar’s reading of Swift is similarly head-spinning (in a similarly posi­­
tive way). Loar problematizes the anti-imperialist ending of Gulliver’s
Travels by close readings of Swift’s pre-Gulliver political pam­phlets as they
contextualize the author’s treatment of sovereignty and violence in his
major satirical work. “Liberty,” Swift seems to think, “depends on virtue
and civility,” but as virtue and civility “depend on civil society,” there is
a necessary link to violence because civil society emerges from “civilitymaking violence” (178). His final chapter, centred on Eliza Haywood’s
Eovaai and The Invisible Spy, presents “a revised understanding of citi­
zen­ship ... figured through female subjectivity” (183) and documents “a
moment in the transition from the awe-inspiring display of sovereign
power toward a more dispersed surveillance enabled by technologies
of observation and transcription”—technologies which, nevertheless,
continue to depend “on violence and on a father/sovereign as the
ultimate guarantor of polite and virtuous behavior” (184).
In this exquisitely conceived and brilliantly argued study, Loar has
brought together all the major Restoration and eighteenth-century
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thinkers and writers who made colonial contact a part of their fictional
projects. Political Magic provides a crucial and important critical analy­
sis of Cavendish, Behn, Defoe, Swift, and Haywood that should (and
I hope will) define discussions of Restoration and early eighteenthcentury literature from now on.
Elizabeth Kraft is Professor of English at the University of Georgia, with
a wide variety of publications in Restoration and eighteenth-century
literature, the latest of which is Restoration Stage Comedies and Hollywood
Remarriage Films: In Conversation with Stanley Cavell (2016).
British Pirates in Print and Performance by Frederick Burwick
and Manushag N. Powell
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
x+232pp. US$90. ISBN 978-1-137-33991-1.
Review by Jacob Crane, Bentley University
In the last several years, popular culture’s obsession with pirates,
initiated largely by the release of the film Pirates of the Caribbean: The
Curse of the Black Pearl in 2003, has given way to successive waves of
vampire and now zombie fiction; however, as Frederick Burwick and
Manushag N. Powell state in the first line of the first chapter of British
Pirates in Print and Performance: “To speak very generally, pirates are
always of interest to the reading public” (15). Throughout this important
critical work, this case is made strongly in the context of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries by the sheer breadth of literary works with
which Burwick and Powell engage—from Daniel Defoe’s Captain
Singleton (1720) to lesser known and studied works, such as American
Maturin Murray Ballou’s Fanny Campbell, Female Pirate Captain (1844).
With the transnational turn in British and American literary studies and
the articulation of various “oceanic” critical models theorized by critics
such as Hester Blum, Margaret Cohen, William Boelhower, and Paul
Giles, among others, it would seem the ideal moment to direct scholarly
attention to the transgressive and nomadic figure of the pirate. That
said, Burwick and Powell emphasize less their work’s position in these
critical conversations and more the transatlantic history of the many
familiar performative tropes that come to represent pirates in the twentyfirst-century public imagination through figures such as Johnny Depp’s
swaggering Jack Sparrow, who surfaces from time to time in the book.
In their introduction, Burwick and Powell establish the literal and
figurative connection between “striding the deck” and “strutting the
stage” as “the heart” of their book (1). Their focus on the performativity
inherent in the pirate figure provides the core for a larger discussion
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that emphasizes pirate dramas as being performed in port towns and
in London theatres where, Burwick and Powell note, there would have
been actual pirates and smugglers in the audience. As a result, they
assert that “the performances engendered a faltering or total breakdown
of the ‘willing suspension of disbelief ’ that left the audience constantly
aware of playacting as playacting” (6). Much of the more fascinating
work done by Burwick and Powell here reconstructs these performance
histories as a way of encompassing the remarkable flexibility and inno­
vation within genealogies of pirate representation. At its best, this study
treats the performative nature of the pirate figure as the ideal test case
for examining the complex triangulation of literary texts, public per­
formances, and popular reception.
If these vibrant genealogies seek to provide a narrative history of con­
temporary pirates in popular culture and the durable collection of tropes
that attend them—peg legs, eye patches, the Jolly Roger—Burwick and
Powell are careful to define the parameters of a term too often utilized
neglectfully. Their admirable interest in precision is evident in the first
two chapters, which catalogue historical and literary instances of “piracy”
as a way of stabilizing this term. As they state: “‘Pirate’ is a legal as well
as a social term: a true pirate is hostis humani generis, the enemy of all
man­kind, considered to have no nation or national protections” (16).
This definition is by no means arbitrary, and Burwick and Powell argue
that the distinctions between pirate, privateer, and corsair held within
them vastly different political inferences and relationships with territorial
national entities. One distinction that could have been discussed in more
depth is that between Euro-American piracy and the orientalist tropes
surrounding the long history of representations and performances of
North African Barbary piracy. While Burwick and Powell periodically
touch on texts regarding Barbary corsairs, such as John Brown’s Barbarossa
(1754), their engagement lacks attention to specific cultural and religious
contexts, undoubtedly owing to the fact that these distinct genealogies
might be considered tangential to the succession and evolution of tropes
at the centre of the authors’ stated interest.
The central chapters of the book primarily analyze stage adaptations
of Byron’s The Corsair (1814), Walter Scott’s The Pirate (1821), and
James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pilot (1824) and The Red Rover (1827).
While outlining performance histories that will no doubt be invaluable
to scholars focusing on these specific works, these chapters are less
compelling than the authors’ more expansive discussions elsewhere.
Nevertheless, Burwick and Powell make a convincing case for these
works and their adaptations contributing essential tropes to the pirate
mythos. They argue that adaptations of Byron’s text perform the pirate
as a figure of both exoticism and eroticism (68), while performances
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of Scott’s The Pirate develop the character of the “gentleman pirate”
(78). Cooper’s novels and their British adaptations, on the other
hand, blur class divisions as well as the line between pirate and patriot
(98). Although individually these conclusions may seem obvious in
the context of each author’s aesthetic, Burwick and Powell brilliantly
deploy these observations to argue that contemporary adaptations and
performances might provide scholars with a more “nuanced sense” of
the “popular interests” that influenced the public reception of these
major authors (98). In doing so, they build on the work of Joseph Roach
and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon to sketch a methodological framework
that can be usefully applied well beyond the critics’ focus on narratives
of pirates and piracy.
An interest in exploring issues of sex and gender often central to per­
formances of the pirate on the stage and at sea runs throughout the
book. However, the two chapters specifically focused on the topic—
“Pirate Sex” and “She-Pirates”—are less developed than other sections.
When compared to the bounty of primary sources to support their
interpretations in previous sections, the former chapter focuses more
on an absence of straight or queer sex in pirate literature. This dearth
of sources leads to inevitable but unsatisfying speculation. By the same
token, in the latter chapter, the authors follow a limited number of
depictions of “she-pirates” that run through pirate literature to conclude
that women pirates, “oversexed and underdressed,” violate “multiple
norms of gendered living” (138).
The conclusion of the book brings Burwick and Powell’s study back
to its fundamental focus: pirate clichés. While only loosely organized
and swifter in its progress than previous chapters, the writers’ closing
narrative touches on each successive trope, from pirate codes to parrots,
directly and concisely. As a more fragmented iteration of the argument
developed at the beginning of the book, the conclusion reminds us
again of the remarkable consistency in performances of the pirate across
the last several centuries, and thus provides a fitting end point to the
fruitful and thorough histories and genealogies the authors reconstruct
throughout their work.
Jacob Crane teaches at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts,
where his research focuses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century narra­
tives of Barbary piracy and captivity.
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Jane Austen and Modernization: Sociological Readings
by James Thompson
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
x+212pp. US$90. ISBN 978-1-137-49601-0.
Review by Megan Taylor, McGill University
James Thompson employs the introduction of Jane Austen and
Modernization to defuse the incendiary potential of his title’s key terms,
“modernization” and “sociological”—terms that he prudently antici­
pates may strike his readers as “cryptically ahistorical” (3) when associ­
ated with Austen. Although she is not contemporaneous with the five
sociologists central to his study—the earliest of whom was writing in the
late nineteenth century—Thompson argues that the same concern lies
at the heart of both their work and Austen’s: “the balance between what
is owed to the group versus [the] individual’s will and freedom” (5).
This “self–society dialectic” (5) is also, Thompson suggests, an essential
aspect of modernization, as he defines it: particularly at the turn of
the nineteenth century, “industrialization and urbanization seemed to
have changed everything about how individuals relate to others” (6).
Through their focus on interpersonal relationships, Austen’s novels
address the same kind of “transformation from traditional society”
(8) in the late eighteenth century that interested early sociologists in
the modernization of the late nineteenth century. While allowing that
Austen is not “an empirical sociologist avant la lettre” (9), Thompson
aims to find fresh insight into her six complete novels by “bring[ing]
to bear ... a sociological disposition to focus on interaction rather than
character” (10).
In the monograph’s central chapters, this interdisciplinary approach
is not always successful. Thompson expresses the hope that his readings
will not be received as “old wine in new bottles,” or “the application of
an exotic vocabulary to tell us what we already know” (9), but some­
times this characterization seems apt. In chapter 1, his conclusion that
Mansfield Park and Persuasion investigate the “failure ... of patrician
authority” (25) does not seem significantly supplemented by Max
Weber’s theory of modernity that “earned” replaces “inherited authority”
(20). Similarly, Erving Goffman’s term “keying,” which refers to “shifts
in interpretation, the ways in which one understanding is transformed
into another” (137), is not necessary to reach the conclusion Thompson
draws in chapter 5, that Northanger Abbey burlesques several genres of
fiction at the same time, “engag[ing] in a pattern of layerings” as “the
gothic key is contained within or superseded by a romance key, which
is in turn contained within a quixotic/ironic key that gestures towards a
more realistic ... fiction” (148).
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Many of Thompson’s close readings are compelling, however, and are
often creatively illuminated by the sociology he draws upon. Providing
a brief but effective preview of his methods in the ensuing chapters,
in his introduction Thompson uses George Simmel’s contention that
“one’s identity is defined as much against the group as it is defined as
part of the group” (6) to reframe Elizabeth Bennet’s dual role in Pride
and Prejudice: “She is both individualized as Elizabeth,” the saucy,
independent heroine that Darcy falls in love with, “and generalized as
Bennet,” disdained by Darcy for her family’s impoverished status, their
vulgarity, and their frequent, public bad behaviour (7). In chapter 3,
Thompson’s reading of the ball at the Crown in Emma extrapolates
from the obvious moral contrast that Austen establishes between
Knightley’s generosity in dancing with Harriet Smith and Mr Elton’s
spite in snubbing her. Thompson argues that this scene exemplifies
Austen’s frequent investment of superficial custom with a deeper
ethical significance: she “has entangled the emptiness of arbitrary
social forms—available men are supposed to make up the wants of the
dance—with authentic social obligation—neighbors are supposed to
treat one another with respect” (83). In this way, Austen “demonstrates
how the mere form is invested with substance” (83).
Thompson returns to this argument in his astute fourth chapter,
on Pride and Prejudice, which he identifies as his book’s centrepiece
(16). Chapter 4 is original and convincing, despite an overabundance of
block quotations. Using Goffman’s definition of social exchange, which
entails an “interactive obligation” (98) to give and receive pleasure,
Thompson plots Darcy and Elizabeth’s courtship in Pride and Prejudice
along the progress of their failures at and subsequent reparations of
social decorum. Darcy’s “civility is the only tool available to repair his
character” in Elizabeth’s eyes, and Austen’s description of their meeting at
Pemberley emphasizes “not ... the substance but ... the style, the manner
of conversation, a politeness ... that neither managed before” (127).
Thompson’s concluding chapter 6 is also persuasive. He summarizes
his theory of an overarching development in Austen’s oeuvre from her
earliest novels to her latest—a theory that, he points out, his previous
chapters have progressively uncovered, even though they have been
un­conventionally organized by chronology of the sociologist and not
the novels being discussed. Thompson posits that Austen “steadily lost
confidence in the ruling order” and that her final fragment Sanditon,
while comedic, pessimistically “thematizes the replacement of tradition
with another order that is at once ridiculous and creepy” (179). This last
phrase also illustrates the engaging informality of Thompson’s prose,
which, though it may sometimes verge on inelegance, is always lucid
and forthright.
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Jane Austen and Modernization might be most accessible to more
advanced students of Austen, since a familiarity with the novels and
with the canon of Austen criticism is presumed. It would also be well
suited to, as well as edifying for, scholars interested in cross-disciplinary
studies, since it demonstrates both the potential pitfalls as well as the
benefits of such analytical fusion.
Megan Taylor is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and
research co-ordinator of the Burney Centre at McGill University. Her work
has appeared in Lumen and Eighteenth-Century Fiction.
Œuvres complètes de Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, romans et contes,
éd. Jean-Michel Racault, Guilhem Armand, Colas Duflo
et Chantale Meure
Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2014.
1053pp. €49. ISBN 978-2-8124-3086-2.
Critique littéraire par Marco Menin, Université de Turin, Italie
La figure de Bernardin de Saint-Pierre a reçu une attention croissante
au cours des dernières années, qui ont été marquées par une floraison
de contributions. La parution de sa première biographie moderne
en 2006 (Malcolm Cook, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre: A Life of Culture
[Oxford: Legenda]), ainsi que la publication de la Correspondance, dans
le projet Electronic Enlightenment de la Voltaire Foundation (Bodleian
Libraries, University of Oxford, http://www.e-enlightenment.com) et
l’organisation de trois colloques à l’occasion du bicentenaire de sa mort
en 2014 (La Réunion, Rouen/Le Havre, Sorbonne), ont contribué à
mettre en lumière la complexité et la polyvalence de sa pensée. Bien qu’il
soit l’un des écrivains les plus éclectiques et représentatifs du tournant
des Lumières (il est romancier et botaniste, philosophe et ingénieur
militaire) l’œuvre de Bernardin est encore largement négligée par la
critique dix-huitiémiste, comme le montre l’« État présent » récemment
publié par Simon Davis (French Studies 69 [2015]: 220–27).
Parmi les raisons qui ont déterminé la mauvaise fortune historio­
graphique de Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, il faut compter le fait qu’il
est le seul des auteurs consacrés du dix-huitième siècle littéraire
français dont les écrits n’ont fait l’objet d’aucune publication d’ensemble
récente et sérieuse. L’unique édition existante des Œuvres complètes,
due à Aimé-Martin, ami et secrétaire de l’écrivain, remonte à près de
deux siècles (Paris: Mequignon-Marvis, 1818, 12 vols.). Cette édition,
indépendamment du fait qu’elle n’est évidemment pas en mesure de
répondre aux critères philologiques modernes, n’a pas été rééditée
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depuis un siècle et demi et elle n’est accessible que dans les fonds anciens
de quelques rares bibliothèques. La carence d’accès matériel aux textes
est enfin comblée par la publication de la première édition critique des
Œuvres complètes dont nous rendons compte ici du volume inaugural.
Délimiter et établir le corpus bernardinien est une tâche considérable:
il se compose non seulement, en grand partie, d’œuvres entièrement
ou partiellement posthumes dont l’authenticité est sujette à caution,
mais il comporte aussi de nombreuses œuvres n’existant qu’à l’état de
manuscrit. Ces manuscrits, en outre, sont souvent des versions con­
currentes de la même œuvre, comme le confirme l’exemple frap­
pant des Harmonies de la nature (voir notamment S. Baridon, Les
Harmonies de la nature di Bernardin de Saint-Pierre: studi di filologia e
di critica testuale [Milan: Istituto Editoriale Cisalpino, 1958]).
Pour réussir dans l’entreprise de « reconstruction » d’une œuvre
entièrement caractérisée par un mode de composition anarchique,
le comité de rédaction, dirigé par Jean-Michel Racault—spécialiste
érudit et incontesté de l’œuvre bernardinienne, comme le confirme
le récent recueil d’essais intitulé Bernardin de Saint-Pierre: Pour une
biographie intellectuelle (Paris: Champion, 2015)—a adopté un mode de
regroupement qui vise à respecter une cohérence à la fois thématique
et chronologique. Le projet éditorial sera divisé en cinq sections de
deux volumes chacune. La première section rassemblera les récits et
les voyages, la deuxième et la troisième les œuvres philosophiques
et scientifiques—à savoir les Études de la nature et les Harmonies de
la nature—la quatrième, les œuvres politiques et pédagogiques, et la
cinquième, les mélanges philosophiques, scientifiques et littéraires.
Dans ce premier tome on trouve l’essentiel des textes de fiction
de Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, précédés d’une utile Bio-bibliographie
(19–32), et accompagnés de leurs divers paratextes auctoriaux (dont
Bernardin, fidèle au principe de la composition par greffes, fait usage
et abus) et d’annexes documentaires. Dans un volume consacré aux
romans et aux contes, il ne pouvait manquer Paul et Virginie, l’écrit qui
a assuré à son auteur une célébrité durable, quoique à certains égards
encombrante, puisqu’il a éclipsé, de fait, le reste de sa production. Pour
replacer cette œuvre célèbre dans le contexte plus large de la pensée
philosophique et scientifique de Bernardin l’encadrement de Paul et
Virginie respecte celui qui avait été adopté initialement par l’auteur: lors
de sa première publication, en 1788, l’« espèce de pastorale » figurait
dans le tome IV de la troisième édition des Études de la nature, elle est ici
précédée d’un Avis sur cet ouvrage et suivie de L’Arcadie. L’Avis, présenté
par Guilhem Armand et Jean-Michel Racault, est une exposition scien­
tifique, solidement informée quoiqu’erronée, du système des marées.
Elle a le mérite de faire ressortir les prémisses épistémologiques
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et philosophiques, résolument anti-newtoniennes, de la pensée de
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. Dans sa présentation du roman, Colas Duflo
insiste aussi sur la synergie entre science, philosophie et littérature,
de façon cohérent avec l’idée que la pastorale est une « application
romanesque » des Études de la nature—dont Duflo a édité l’unique
édition moderne jusqu’ici disponible (Saint-Étienne: Publications de
l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2007)—en particulier de la question de
la théodicée naturelle.
Alors que Paul et Virginie était destiné à se placer parmi les grands
mythes de la littérature occidentale, le sort du court roman qui le
suivait dans la troisième édition des Études, L’Arcadie, a été très
différent. L’Arcadie est une sorte d’épopée en prose sur le modèle de
Télémaque; largement oubliée, même par les spécialistes de son auteur,
elle n’a guère été lue même en son temps. Reste d’un très vaste projet
avorté, L’Arcadie est un « roman archéologique » axé sur l’échappatoire
utopique. L’utopie est ici le moyen de restaurer l’harmonie entre
l’individuel et le collectif: la représentation d’un avenir heureux ne
passe pas, cette fois, par une transposition dans l’espace, mais par
la projection dans un très ancien passé. Le plan définitif de cet écrit
inachevé aurait dû être structuré par le récit d’un voyage opposant au
monde pastoral de l’Arcadie, image de l’état de nature rousseauiste,
l’état de barbarie de la société des Gaules, plusieurs siècles avant la
conquête romaine ainsi que la corruption de l’Égypte de Séstoris,
emblème du plus haut degré de civilisation. Comme le montre de
manière convaincante Jean-Michel Racault dans sa présentation, grâce
à sa dimension utopique, ce récit à l’antique, est aussi une réflexion
politique sur la société française à la vieille de la Révolution.
Le même intérêt pour un ailleurs politique rêvé et pour la littérature
de voyage qui anime le projet de L’Arcadie, se retrouve dans la section
finale du volume, éditée par Chantale Meure, et intitulée Contes indiens
et aventures philosophiques. Sous ce titre (factice mais efficace) ont été
réunis cinq opuscules au statut assez différent, mais constituant une
indiscutable unité formelle et thématique. Les deux premiers textes,
deux contes philosophiques, La Chaumière indienne et Le Café de Surate,
ont été publiés du vivant de l’auteur, respectivement en 1791 et 1792.
Le troisième et le quatrième texte, L’éloge historique et philosophique de
mon ami et les Voyages de Codrus ont parus pour la première fois dans
les Œuvres complètes éditées par Aimé-Martin. Il s’agit respectivement
d’une évocation, à la fois lyrique et ironique, du départ vers l’île de France
en compagnie de l’« ami » Favori, petit chien épagneul, et d’un conte
autobiographique, masqué sous une fiction à l’antique, qui réfléchit—
comme la plus célèbre Chaumière indienne—sur les véritables valeurs
de la vie. Le volume se termine par une agréable surprise, une œuvre
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romanesque inédite, intitulée Histoire de l’Indien. Ce récit d’aventure,
qui mène son héros des rives du Gange à l’embouchure de l’Amazone,
en passant par le Grand Nord, développe le thème, cher à Bernardin, de
la fondation d’une république utopique et philanthropique. Ces écrits
oubliés (mis à part La Chaumière indienne), et pour certains inconnus,
ont le mérite de faire ressortir à la fois la place cruciale de l’Inde
dans l’imaginaire bernardinien—récent objet d’enquête du collectif
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre et l’océan Indien (Paris: Garnier, 2011)—et la
fécondité du modèle voltairien de conte philosophique dans l’ouvrage
d’un disciple de Rousseau.
En conclusion, la publication du premier volume des Œuvres
complètes de Bernardin de Saint-Pierre ne peut être accueillie qu’avec
joie par tous les dix-huitiémistes. La qualité du travail philologique, la
précision des apparats critiques, l’érudition solide mais jamais pesante,
font de cet ouvrage l’édition de référence pour les générations à venir.
L’espoir est que cette publication puisse contribuer à mettre fin, une fois
pour toutes, à l’époque de l’indifférence ou, pire, de la condescendance
critique, dont a souffert Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, et à lui donner
sa juste place, dans l’histoire (littéraire, mais aussi philosophique et
scientifique) du tournant des Lumières.
Marco Menin, maître de conférences en histoire de la philosophie à
l’Université de Turin, en Italie, se consacre à la philosophie des Lumières,
à l’exploration des relations entre la pensée philosophique et la pensée
littéraire en particulier. Il a publié plusieurs articles concernent l’histoire
de la sensibilité sur des revues internationales (Rousseau, Diderot, Sade).
Il travaille actuellement à une traduction italienne des Études de la nature
de Bernardin de Saint-Pierre.
ECF 29, no. 1 © 2016 McMaster University