Domestic Realities and Imperial Fictions: Jane Austen's Novels in Eighteenth-Century Contexts (review)

REVIEWS 99 Loaisel; he quotes copiously from it, under various categories: "Un romantique 'préromantique ,'" "L'Ossianisme tréogatien," "Débat sur les sources de René et Atala," and so on. It is here especially that, faced with evaluations like "un des plus féconds parmi les auteurs de troisième ordre du xvrae siècle finissant" (Baldensperger, quoted on p. 54), "Loaisel tout d'abord est de ceux que leur médiocrité même rend curieusement sensibles à toutes les influences ambiantes" (Mornet, quoted on p. 73), and "Dolbreuse ... œuvre médiocre, mais d'une saveur singulière" (Monglond, quoted on pp. 88-89), we begin to question whether this author was worth still one more study. It is not that Giménez intends to confute these severe critics. He admits that Loaisel's besetting sin is "prolixité" and that "sentimentalité" is his "marque propre" (p. 14): why then does he keep hammering away at what is so clear anyway? Why not in his overview subordinate all the obvious flaws to a celebration of the critics' and his own gradual uncovering of whatever it is that does not allow us to forget about Loaisel? The third part of the book, though still tributary to many previous critics and scholars, who are quoted abundantly, is more personal. This section, the book's principal contribution to ongoing Loaisel studies, is a "thematic" reading of his best-known work, Dolbreuse ou l'homme du siècle, ramené à la vérité par le sentiment et par la raison (1785). Giménez quotes much from the text as he goes along; he compares Loaisel's treatment of natural scenery, the feeling of melancholy, temptations of the flesh, humiliation and redemption, and many other themes, to that of better-known writers; he makes reference to all the standard critical works relevant to the various themes and motifs he considers. In a day when, I fear, practically all our students and most of our colleagues find even La Nouvelle Héloïse unreadable, there is little chance that many will be led by this study to pick up Loaisel's derivative and much paler praise of conjugal love, study of sexual sin and repentance, and examination of wounded sensibility. But Giménez's study points out that the specialist, if he or she has not already done so, simply must pay attention to Loaisel. Giménez makes it very plain that Dolbreuse is (along with narratives by such as Baculard d'Arnaud and Sade) a key text in the series that starts with Rousseau and then via René and Oberman connects the eighteenth-century roman sensible with the nineteenth-century fictional mainstream. In the first Appendix Giménez gives a highly interesting summary of the recently rediscovered Héloïse et Abeilard, ou Les Victimes de l'Amour of Loaisel. One wishes that he had added a more extensive critical evaluation of the literary merits of this 1803 historical novel, written almost at the end of Loaisel's career. All sorts of tables and indexes, which make the wealth of information available in this compendium very easy to find, conclude the volume. Charles A. Porter Yale University Maaja A. Stewart. Domestic Realities and Imperial Fictions: Jane Austen's Novels in Eighteenth-Century Contexts. Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1993. xi + 209pp. ISBN 0-8203-1540-0. In an era of books composed by hastily stringing together guest lectures, conference papers, and essays first published elsewhere, Maaja A. Stewart has resisted the current mode of academic production and written a single, sustained, densely layered treatment of the political and economic realities informing Jane Austen's fiction—with particular attention to gender as a constitutive element of those realities. She places Austen in the 100 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 7:1 historical context of the "second phase of British imperialism," which she dates from the battle of Plassey (1757) to the 1813 Charter Act—a period marked by the American Revolution, the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings, governor-general of Bengal, and the passage in Parliament of a bill abolishing the slave trade. She sets out to investigate how imperialism affected women's lives and how contemporary narratives registered as...