Richardson and Fielding: The Dynamics of a Critical Rivalry (review)

100 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 13:1 Allen Michie. Richardson and Fielding: The Dynamics of a Critical Rivalry. Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell University Press, 1999. 264pp. US$42.50. ISBN 0-8387-5419-8. Allen Michie argues that very little informed, careful, and balanced commentary has been devoted to the controversial relationship between Richardson and Fielding. Yet, unmistakably, the "stakes of this particular debate are high for our understanding of what the English novel is and how it came to be that way" (p. 14). Michie tries to improve our understanding by "surveying the recurring dichotomies projected onto Richardson and Fielding by eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century readers" (p. 14). In fact, his methodological experiment and its contribution to literary history deserve a less modest description. It is doubtful whether his main theoretical model, Hans Robert Jauss, presented findings on comparably unwieldy topics with such economy, clarity, and humour as Michie offers in this accessibly organized, well-documented, and perceptive critical study. Many of Jauss's readers have found his hermeneutical provocation to positivistic philology and formalism more compelling than the practical example of his writing of literary history. Michie's use of Jauss, by contrast, suggests what valuable methods reception theory can afford to historically oriented criticism. His book is a work of criticism rather than a bibliographical study or a research tool that makes available integral or lengthy primary documents. His bibliography on the Richardson/Fielding opposition, however, gives a plentiful sampling of relevant materials (though these are not always identified in first editions or in full bibliographical detail); and his literary-historical narrative articulates critical claims that should challenge readers to investigate the primary evidence for themselves . Michie begins to connect and explain a multitude of culturally significant literary-historical data that had mostly already been noted but were neglected until he put them to use. He draws on existing bibliographies, literary histories, encyclopedias, biographical dictionaries, letters, diaries, and records of publication , sale, and library lending of Richardson's and Fielding's novels. His stated aim is to write a reception history of the Richardson/Fielding opposition from Shamela (1741) to Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel (1957). This painstaking reconstruction of the perennial retellings of the novelists' relationship not only cites these materials copiously but also adds to the bibliographies on the subject. Chapter 1, a lucid introduction to reception theory, defines the terms ofMichie's experiment in literary history. He organizes his study in reference to Jauss's three types of readers: poet, critic, and general public (respectively type-one, type-two, and type-three readers), to which he adds a fourth type: the student or professional scholar. Likewise, though not in strict correlation, he refers to Jauss's three Aristotelian modes of reading: poiesis (active production), aesthesis (passive contemplation), and catharsis (didactic effect), to which he adds a fourth mode: theoria (insight, understanding, professional work). Chapters 2 to 4, on the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, "trace the turning points in the predominantly British and American reception history of Richardson and Fielding by documenting which type of reader transitions to and from which REVIEWS 101 mode of reading" (p. 35). Although he gives attention to "Foreign Reception" in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, his chief concern is the novelists' "reputations in England" (p. 86). He argues that the Anglo-American "discourse of reception" is dominated by the general reader in the eighteenth century, by the creative writer in the nineteenth century, and by the professional literary critic in the twentieth century (p. 36). Michie makes strong assertions that implicitly invite us to contradict him if we can. Thus, we read, by the late eighteenth century, "there is not a single reader who records a preference for Richardson over Fielding" (p. 201). In the nineteenth century, there "is not a single critic ... who prefers the epistolary when comparing Richardson's form to Fielding's" (p. 111). Tuckerman's praise of Richardson's tragedy and Fielding's comedy "is unique in the century" (p. 129). "Dickens is the only writer in the period who finds both Richardson and Fielding to be realists" (p. 130). Michie's remarks in this style may tempt readers to echo his...