<i>The Handbook of the British Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century</i> . Ed. Katrin Berndt and Alessa Johns

The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats · 2023-07-01

The Handbook of the British Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century, edited by Katrin Berndt and Alessa Johns, is large in size and scope. Part of De Gruyter’s Handbooks of English and American Studies: Text and Theory series, it joins the proliferating ranks of oversized “handbooks” that have fully metaphorized that term. This one is an oversized, six-hundred-page, heavy behemoth that would only slip into a Brobdingnagian pocket for casual consultation. For human-sized scholars, it suggests an argument for e-readers and online skimming, and perhaps only accidentally slipped into print for examination purposes, as it seems designed—and priced—for library shelves and student research projects. So, I read this with an eye to such questions, should your library order this and is it helpful for students?The Handbook contains an introduction by the editors, six broad contextual essays on “Systematic Questions,” and twenty-five “Close Readings,” essays on individual works. It’s a solid snapshot of the academic field, written by a range of senior and emerging scholars from Europe and Anglo-North America, and addresses the several contexts that have informed the field over the past half-century (which seems to be the half-life of criticism). The systemic introductory essays are contextual overviews of the novel’s relation to politics, subjectivity, gender and sexuality, colonialism, print culture, and the environment. Each of the individual readings features sections on context, narrative and aesthetic strategies, and reception and theoretical perspectives, tweaked in various ways by individual contributors. And the selection of novels, and so the conception of both the genre and its history, is capacious, starting with Behn’s Oroonoko and ending with Austen’s Persuasion, and featuring works that represent the evolving canons that have defined the field, from the realism of Watt’s Rise of the Novel (Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Burney, Austen) through the feminist correction (Behn, Haywood, Lennox, Mackenzie, Wollstonecraft) and the more recent post-colonial expansion (Gibbes, Earle, the anonymous The Woman of Colour). I was also happy to see included works that might be considered para-novelistic, not only the otherwise canonical Gulliver’s Travels and Rasselas but also outliers like Paltock’s Peter Wilkins and Scott’s Millenium Hall. Most of the essays offer solid overviews of the work, its context, and its critical issues, and would be useful as first stops for students researching the work. Though the volume is designed as an introduction, a few essays offer compelling new readings. For purposes of a review, I’ve chosen half a dozen essays I most enjoyed to give a sense of the range of highlights of the volume.Of the contextual chapters, I found Katherine Binhammer’s “The Novel and Intimacy: Gender, Sexuality, and Queer Readings” especially clear and thorough. The essay addresses the ways the genre gave new narrative authority to women’s voices and non-elite lives, while also reproducing the gender binary, heteronormativity, and sexual division of labor of middle-class ideology, though still offering possibilities to experiment with the liminal subjectivities of “gender outlaws.” Binhammer’s survey of the history of feminist criticism of the novel and the evolution of questions about gender and sexuality is excellent and one I would recommend to students beginning research on these topics. Robert Markley’s overview of “The Novel and the Environment” introduces an especially welcome new direction of the field, one that several essays consider as well, and in itself demonstrates the interest of the approach. The chapter addresses how novels engage with ecological systems and conceptions of nature. The reading of nutmeg in Oroonoko, as a figure for both the commercial potential of Surinam and its natural abundance, is excellent, as is the reading of the second two volumes of the Robinson Crusoe trilogy, which reject the first book’s colonial project while imagining an anti-ecological ideology of inexhaustibility. The essay is capped with a reading of Mansfield Park as exemplifying Austen’s attention to the complexities of landscape, and her idealized vision of a harmonious organic whole.Katrin Röder’s essay on Robinson Crusoe also addresses the two sequels and offers an excellent and innovative reading of the trilogy as a single project exploring the hermeneutics of happiness. The essay argues that Robinson Crusoe is organized by the “rambling” and restlessness that underlies capitalist, colonial, and evangelical projects, but Farther Adventures seeks to balance rambling and reflection, while the final volume, Serious Reflections, takes reflection and the value of retirement more seriously. With nuanced readings, Röder presents the Crusoe trilogy as a complex examination of the value of the utilitarianism and ambitious individualism that Crusoe often stands for: “the trilogy emphasizes the flawed, fallen nature of the protagonist and his narrative. Significantly, however, it also repeatedly performs the fall of the sinful, short-sighted narrator as well as the restrictedness and biased nature of his vision.”As Röder’s account of Robinson Crusoe attends to its more paranovelistic elements, the volume also includes essays on works at the edges of the genre and its history. Jakub Lipski’s chapter on Robert Paltock’s strange and wonderful Peter Wilkins is especially interesting and helpful. Lipski emphasizes the metafictional aspects of the novel and its formal complexity, describing it as formed of the genres of the Robinsonade, the imaginary voyage, and utopia. The speculative aspects of the work are rendered with the rich visual detail associated with realism, and Lipski’s compelling account of Paltock’s mix of flying people, abolitionist politics, and self-reflexivity offers both an excellent introduction to a bizarre and fascinating book and an enticement to read, or reread, it. Tobias Menely’s chapter on Rasselas likewise addresses its generic complexity. A dialogization of romance, beginning in the world of romance and shifting to a novelistic world, Rasselas allegorizes the emergence of the novel in moving from myth to history. Rasselas himself is a novelistic character, Menely suggests, developed in “a critical relation to received ideas and an idealizing relation to imagined alternatives,” a philosophical stance reproduced by the work as a whole. Johnson offers readers neither clear wisdom nor narrative resolution, though he does advocate for the value of friendship and makes progressive briefs for female agency and against colonialism.Alexandra Ileana Bacalu’s account of Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling stands out as an exemplary introduction for students. Bacalu offers an excellent, succinct, and thorough overview of the philosophical and literary contexts of sensibility, from Locke and Shaftesbury through the Scottish Enlightenment, and an elegant reading of the ambivalence of the novel’s sentimentality. At once a sharp analysis of an ironic text that interrogates as much as it asserts and an excellent example of how to situate a reading in literary, cultural, and critical contexts, this is one of the volume’s highlights. Eve Tavor Bannet’s chapter on Evelina is another great introductory chapter. A clear and helpful discussion of courtship novels and the cultural centrality of letter-writing frames a reading of how the novel’s polyphonic epistolary form positions readers as voyeurs, while also giving them the freedom to judge characters and events for themselves. Bannet’s essay also presents two especially deft and helpful moves. She notes how Burney works with a spectrum of kinds and intensities of humor, a welcome reminder of the importance of tone as a way to steer and guide readers’ relationships to texts. And she has an excellent discussion of Burney use of “analogous characters and scenes to create a subtext of social critique”: “Novels that present analogies as well as plots require us to connect words, scenes, and characters from different places in the novel, which are linked by resemblances, and repeat, and vary one another, and to consider what the patterns emerging from comparison between them demonstrate or suggest.” That the repeated balls and carriage scenes and the multiple fathers and mothers of the novel create patterns to be read alongside the linear momentum of the plot is both a helpful primer for students on Burney’s narrative procedures and an excellent introduction to the practice of critically reading novelistic form.Katharina Rennhak’s reading of Edgeworth’s Ormond also provides an exemplary survey of the critical contexts of the novel, with a succinct and useful account of the scholarly re-evaluation of Edgeworth over the past three decades and an interesting account of the novel’s reversal of the conventional colonial semantics of space. Rennhak’s reading focuses on Ormond’s nuanced portrait of the varieties of Irish identity and its gender politics. Though the novel features complex men and flat female characters, Rennhak argues that Edgeworth critiques the double standard of gender expectations: “It seems that the ideal of female propriety can be hinted at in a narrative only by not involving women characters as active participants in the plot, and by not imagining situations which would grant them any independent agency . . . only those characters can remain unblemished who remain invisible.” The paradox of invisible female authority is exemplified in Lady Annaly, who at once provides critical guidance to Ormond and figures Edgeworth’s own narrative voice.In general, the particular essays are helpful, thorough, and interesting introductions to the particular novels; there’s broad coverage of the period; and the readings generally are nuanced and sophisticated. The volume offers a good resource for students, and the particular essays will serve as good first steps toward further research on the novels, with both solid overviews and current bibliographies. As a snapshot of the field, the volume provides a comprehensive overview of the novel as the modern literary form, as the editors put it. Berndt and Johns characterize the genre as offering the aesthetic and thematic flexibility required to deal with emergence of the modern world, its shifting social hierarchies and its emergent modes of subjectivity. The novel is a “narrative means of making sense of an increasingly complex and complicated environment” and encourages identification with characters as part of modernity’s new attention to interiority and psychology. The editors, though, refreshingly focus less on individual development alone than on “the need for connection” in a dynamic, rapidly changing period. While novels rouse an emotional response, they also rehearse stories alert to the interplay of claims of individual agency and community. Flexibility, capaciousness, and dynamic dialogism define the novel, which may be a way to refuse definition at all—and indeed, the editors conclude the Introduction with a survey of the various sub-genres gathered under the umbrella term “novel”: epistolary, comic, travel, sentimental, gothic, historical, and so on. One might wonder if there is a genre of the novel at all, unless it is a form organized as much by entropy as order. Such scholarly quibbles aside, this volume offers a broad and helpful snapshot of the current state of play in the history of the novel—or its various histories—and can be recommended to those who are interested in exploring the field.

Decrease in Overall Vaccine Hesitancy in College Students during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Vaccines · 2023 · 4 citations

• Sociology
• Medicine
• Family medicine

The COVID-19 pandemic changed our world as we know it and continues to be a global problem three years since the pandemic began. Several vaccines were produced, but there was a considerable amount of societal turmoil surrounding them that has affected the way people view not only COVID-19 vaccines but all vaccines. We used a survey to compare how attitudes towards vaccination have changed in college students during the pandemic. An initial survey was administered in 2021, then a follow-up in 2022. Out of 316 respondents who answered the first survey, 192 completed the follow-up. The survey was designed to measure trends in changes to vaccine attitudes since the COVID-19 pandemic began. By comparing the first survey in 2021 and the follow-up, we found that roughly 55% of respondents' vaccine attitudes did not change, roughly 44% of respondents' attitudes towards vaccines became more positive, and only about 1% of the respondents' vaccine attitudes became more negative. Improved view of vaccines was associated with political views and increased trust in medicine and the healthcare system. Worsened opinions of vaccines were associated with a belief that the COVID-19 vaccine affected fertility.

The CUAHSI HydroShare Platform for Hydrology Data and Model Sharing

HydroShare Resources · 2023-12-05

Acknowledgments

Stanford University Press eBooks · 2021

• Geography

Tristram Shandy, Essayist

Oxford University Press eBooks · 2020

• Literature
• Art
• Art history

The genre of Laurence Sterne’s <italic>Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy</italic> is a long-standing critical crux. Indeed, the work wears its complex generic mixtures on its sleeve even as it references the great borrowers from whom Sterne learned to borrow: Rabelais, Montaigne, Cervantes, Burton. This chapter focuses on Sterne’s use of Montaigne’s <italic>Essays</italic> as a model for a generic procedure that informs Sterne’s writing in its organization (or disorganization), its self-conscious gathering of texts, its free commentary, and its interactivity with both its contexts of citation and its readers. <italic>Tristram Shandy</italic> is a watershed text in which the full range of the essay tradition is revisited, adapted, used, and abused to form a conversational, bookish, self-conscious, and digressive work that is as much essay as novel.

Romance after Critique

Studies in eighteenth century culture/Studies in eighteenth-century culture · 2020

• Literature
• Aesthetics
• Philosophy

Romance after Critique Scott Black (bio) A postcritical eighteenth century might be an eighteenth century without the novel, or at least with the novel put in its place as one prose genre among several. Different genres, of course, make different demands and afford different practices of reading. To recognize that many of our default ways of reading are informed by the formal assumptions of the novel—a genre of realism, representation, and modernity—is also to recognize that there are, and were, other ways of reading, other kinds of texts, and other patterns of literary history. Fredric Jameson observes "the history of the novel is inevitably the history of the realist novel."1 But the history of fiction is not inevitably the history of the novel. Jameson has defined the "ideal of realism" as "a narrative discourse which in one form or another unites the experience of daily life with a properly cognitive, mapping, or well-nigh scientific perspective."2 I'm interested in what comes into focus if we discard the category of the novel, with its mapping of ordinary experience, and consider modes of fiction that operate outside those exigencies. What becomes visible if we reject the seemingly automatic assumptions that the novel is what modern prose fiction is and the tendency and telos of literary history? For Georg Lukács, the novel is the indigenous genre of modernity, "the form of mature virility" by which we moderns comprehend ourselves as modern, estranged from the immanence of traditional meaning but compensated by an enlightened, demystified understanding and what Michael McKeon characterizes as the "negative freedom of autonomous self-recognition."3 But do we only read [End Page 317] for these brave, manly, and heroic exigencies? I want to suggest that the category of the novel, with its focus on realism, mapping, and modernity, is not adequate for all fiction—and not even in the modern world. I pose four intertwined questions. What is fiction without the novel? What is literary history without the novel? What is reading without the novel? What other forms might we recognize, and what other demands, pleasures, and practices of reading might emerge by sidelining the novel? Fiction without the novel is romance, a modality of story less concerned with rendering ordinary life or serving a useful moral, psychological, or political purpose than with affording experiences that are avowedly extraordinary and valuable for just that reason. Romance is also a name for anachronism and so a reminder that we are never fully modern, defined by a single time, or existing in a single timescale. Rather, we are dense overlays of evolved nature and interwoven cultures of multiple provenance, tangled roots, and manifold impurities. Romance also names the entropy of literary history, the way forms decay but also drift, survive, and sometimes even thrive in distant and foreign worlds. Literary history without the novel is turbulent and recursive, not organized by the trajectories of modernity and progress but a record of accident, indirection, improper passion, and sometimes willful mistakes. To tell this story, we need a looser sense of history that's responsive to chance and entropy and a weaker sense of agency that's shared across local use and the subtle momentum of the forms we adopt. At the heart of such an eighteenth century might be two parables of the survival of anachronistic forms and the drift of fictions, Don Quixote and The Arabian Nights, both of which stage the problems, pleasures, and possibilities of storytelling and reading in ways that remain enormously helpful and neither of which can be even remotely accounted for in strictly national or contextual terms. Yet both of these foundational works had enormous impact on the cultures that borrowed them, adapted them, and made them their own. And they are still vibrantly entertaining and wonderful to teach to students who like, quite rightly, to read about divine fools, djinns, crossed lovers, fantasy, baroque cruelties, and all the other stuff that's bled out of the realism we piously insist is the only worthy material of literary education. I take romance not merely as the prehistory of the novel but also its alter ego, its contemporary and complement—and...

Empiricism and the Early Theory of the Novel

The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats · 2020-01-01

Empiricism and the Early Theory of the Novel by Roger Maioli

The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats · 2020-01-01

Reviewed by: Empiricism and the Early Theory of the Novel by Roger Maioli Scott Black Roger Maioli. Empiricism and the Early Theory of the Novel. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Pp. xxi + 202. $109.99. For literary historians, the novel is a product of empiricist epistemology. Novels adopt empiricism’s emphasis on particulars for their distinctive formal realism and reground the traditional claims of literature’s moral instruction on their ability to represent the real world accurately. But while following modern philosophers in their overturning of ancient ontology—for the moderns the real world is known through the senses and the ideas that grounded the ideal reality of Plato are only secondary effects of mental associations— novelists had to grapple with the fundamental incompatibility between realism and reality. Novels might be like reality but they are fictions, and as fictions they cannot offer real knowledge or instruction about the world. For ancient philosophy, literature was valued for its ability to reach the reality beyond our imperfect senses, but for modern novelists the imaginative force of their fictions subjects them to doubt, which makes those fictions misleading as philosophical or pedagogical tools. For novelists who wanted to see themselves not just as entertainers but as moral instructors, empiricism offered a challenge. Maioli’s book offers an insightful and valuable account of the various ways eighteenth-century novelists grappled with this problem, seeking to defend the novel, ultimately unsuccessfully, in empiricist terms. Addressing a lacuna in McKeon’s account of the origin of the novel, Maioli shows how novelists sought to update traditional defenses of literature for an empiricist age. McKeon’s account of the development of the novel ends with Fielding’s skeptical mockery of the naïve empiricist claim of early novelists to be presenting true histories. But what happened between the 1740s and the eventual development of an aesthetic, rather than an empiricist, defense of the novel? As Maioli demonstrates, novelists throughout the century sought to justify their works as useful vehicles for education. Starting with Hume as a major representative of empiricism at the moment of the novel’s consolidation as a putatively empiricist form, and moving through lively, careful, and nuanced discussions of Henry Fielding, Lennox, Austen, Godwin, and Sterne, Maioli shows how claims for “literary cognitivism,” the ability of fiction to speak of and to experience, were made throughout the eighteenth century. Though thoroughly modern in his philosophy, Hume was a traditionalist in aesthetics. Like Locke, he exhibited the standard empiricist distrust of the imagination, discounting imaginative literature as a valid source of knowledge. But, Maioli asks, what about his own thought experiments? Are not they tacit acknowledgments of the heuristic value of fictions? In their broad representations of life, with their necessary simplifications—paradigmatically, their exaggerated emphasis on love—novels mischaracterize human motivations, distort the complexity of the real world, and fail to serve as proper thought experiments. [End Page 89] Hume was no fan of novels, which he thought failed as poetry (too low to please) and as history (too reductively simple to instruct). He serves as a marker of the challenge novelists faced in seeking to justify the pedagogical ambitions of their work at a moment when the classical defense of literature was undermined by empiricist epistemology. Maioli discusses Fielding’s addressing this problem by retooling two concepts, true history and probability. In Joseph Andrews, true history provides a way to educate readers in moral lessons, like the disjunction between profession and behavior, by providing particular examples of general principles. This offers a version of history’s traditional educative purpose, but here the general principles, while gathered from Fielding’s own experience, are presented in fictional form. Readers may then test these examples by the criteria of probability, another category Fielding reworks in terms of empiricist psychology. Experience justifies both the evidentiary value of the fictional examples, gathered from fictional interactions, and their educative worth, which is tested against experience. In this way Fielding seeks to preserve the classical pedagogical project of literature with empiricism’s emphasis on experience. Lennox grapples with a version of this problem at the end of The Female Quixote when Arabella discusses romances with the Johnsonian Doctor...

David Russell, <i>Tact: Aesthetic Liberalism and the Essay Form in Nineteenth-Century Britain</i>. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018. x+200 pp. US$35.00.

The Wordsworth Circle · 2020-09-01

Without the Novel

University of Virginia Press eBooks · 2019-08-23 · 8 citations