Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century

There are two novels that many of this year's studies refer to either directly or obliquely. They are Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey and Sophia Lee's best seller, The Recess. Both of these Gothic novels question closely and acutely from the angle of women's experience the relationship between romance and history, and find in history and historical techniques of authentication opportunities to develop the range of romance. Also they tell stories in which the relation between metropolitan systems of authority and remote or exotic habitats is complicated by tastes and expectations that are not as easily regulated as people (inside and outside the narrative) might think. To this extent Jane Austen and Sophia Lee dominate the three major themes of the year 2000 in eighteenth-century studies. In gender studies this is the discovery of a more intricate set of reactions between domesticity and the public sphere than had previously been considered possible. In genre studies it is a growing appreciation of the dialectical subtleties of genre, particularly in the period of the Gothic novel. And in postcolonial studies it is an awareness of how the tide of ideas and practices flowing back and forth between the metropolis and its periphery blurs the starker outlines of national identity and imperial purpose, and brings to the surface the anomaly of Creole identity and creolized ideologies. These three avenues of inquiry depend upon a knowledge of the trade in print, which is clearly the next important area of basic research in the period. These are exciting developments, apt for a new century of literary criticism.

The Novel, the Canon, the Gothic, and Taste

Despite the increasing emphasis on cultural, sociological, and economic forces governing the production and consumption of literature in the eighteenth century, the "rise of the novel"--the history of the origin and development of a genre--still exerts a strong fascination over scholars. To help them arrange and fix their ideas, Michael McKeon has edited a notable supplement to his Origins of the English Novel (1987). His Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach is an anthology of pieces ranging from Georg Lukács to Nancy Armstrong, Northrop Frye to Clifford Siskin. Although it covers a set of issues that have arisen or become more prominent since the eighties, such as domesticity, nationalism, cultural identity, and character, the anthology has two grand underlying themes. They are the nature of genre and the laws of generic change. Genre is distinct from a mode (such as narrative), for while a mode is transhistorical and unchanging, a genre is contingent and conventional, and is changing all the time. The big theories arrayed here relativize this distinction by operating between the extremes of a refined formalism (José Ortega y Gasset) and a resolute empiricism (Ian Watt). McKeon, who appears here self-anthologized, believes the novel emerges from an unstable period of history to represent a new division of knowledge and a fresh relation of truth to virtue. His dialectical history of the genre emerges from what mathematicians would call a feedback loop, where each succeeding solution to the problem of form and content presents the terms of the new problem to be solved. Thus the "naive empiricism" that underwrote the realism of the first novels acquires various forms of self-conscious detachment and parodic extension in the later period. How is the strong feminist emphasis on the domesticity of fiction to fit into this overarching theory of generic change, since domesticity seems to be no more than the colony of the new division of knowledge, not its native ground? In the work of Gillian Brown the anthology finds a dialectical account of domestic fiction, where the Lukácsian homelessness of the novel is figured as a contest between the private and public spheres that is resolved at the level of the domestic female, the latest in the novelistic line of singular individuals...