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MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 61.4 (2000) 683-686



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Book Review

Licensing Entertainment:
The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684-1750


Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684-1750. By William B. Warner. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. xvi + 325 pp. $48.00 cloth, $22.50 paper.

Reading William B. Warner's book is similar to one's first encounter with the novels of Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, the two writers he cites as prime movers in the struggle to reform reading practices from the novel of amatory intrigue to that of ethical instruction: the author's prolixity, disingenuousness, and pedantry overshadow his scholarship, range, and sheer invention. Warner seeks to enlarge the ethnocentric, value-ridden category of the novel as understood by twentieth-century literary critics. "I rewrite the literary history of the novel," he declares, with typical bravado, "so that it becomes a subset of the cultural history of print entertainment" (xi). His book issues a challenge to three critical traditions: first, the tendency to distinguish between "literary" and "nonliterary" modes of narrative fiction in the rapidly changing print market of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; second, the practice of those feminist critics who claim to identify in the period the production of a specifically and/or exclusively "female" reader (rather than the "general reader" he sees as a central fictional construct of print culture) and to trace a tradition of female voice/authorship in the novel; and third, the post-Wattian preoccupation with the emergence of "realism" as a mode of representation used in the eighteenth century to obscure the dialectic between the novel of amatory intrigue and the novel of ethical instruction, whereby the one "defeats" the other by assimilation rather than simple negation.

The story Warner tells is a fairly simple fable somewhat complicated by the contradictory pressures of a desire to achieve historical generalization about narrative form, national identity, and the nature of media entertainment and of a fondness for close reading of individual texts. Hence a few novels bear the burden of acting out the drama of first nurturing and then [End Page 683] suppressing the absorptive pleasures of reading: Aphra Behn's Love-letters between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684-87), Delarivier Manley's New Atalantis (1709), and Eliza Haywood's Love in Excess (1719-20) serve as examples of the shameless pleasures of the novel of amatory intrigue, which, through its seriality, its myths of transgression and assertion of authority (political and textual), and its plot-driven narrative, turn the novel into "an entertainment machine" (166). Following Penelope Aubin's concerted effort to shape novels "to produce an ethical alternative to prevailing patterns of reading for entertainment" (150), Defoe's Roxana (1719) marks a turning point, when the absorptive practices of novel reading are set in conflict with ethical concerns that repeatedly stonewall the pursuit of narrative closure, resulting in "a book-length face-off between a desiring subject and an ethical one" (174). In Pamela (1740) Richardson takes up the baton for an "ethical" fiction again, using Aubin as a "point of entrance into the media culture of novelistic entertainments" (183).

Pamela and the media event that surrounds its publication is said to stage the difficulty of negating "the specter of the erotically aroused (usually female) body absorbed in novel reading" (211); even as it inscribes the possibility of acts of communication misfiring through the willful/desiring interpretive strategies of a reader (most commonly Mr. B's "construction" of Pamela's meaning as disguised consent/manipulation), the novel seeks to secure and ground the reverse possibility: that "the novel's absorptive power over the reader also gives the novel the potential to turn the readers toward virtue" (226). Finally, Fielding's Joseph Andrews (1742) is identified as contributing to the same project as Defoe's and Richardson's, that of "elevating" novel reading to an act of virtue rather than one of absorptive self-pleasuring, but by different means, in particular by escaping the tendency to slip into...

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