Enlightenment and Romance (review)

180EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION15:1 necessarily incompatible roles of the Richardsonian inner self and the Revolutionary political animal. Jefferson and Sterne are a less unusual pair— Jefferson is well known as a philosopher of sentiment with a remarkable gift of ethical flexibility, and Sterne, a cleric with a libertine bent, can keep pace with him in what Giles calls his "chameleonic capacity." Jefferson's writings and his political activities were equally performative and, as Giles demonstrates, Sterne was a crucial mentor in Enlightenment duplicity. Behind all these slippages of meaning lies the crisis of authority culminating in and generated by the Revolutionary War. Paul Giles has a difficult rhetorical task—as Tristram observes of life in general, "there is so much unfixed and equivocal matter starting up, with so many breaks and gaps in it." To define, explain, and analyse the polysemy that marks his texts without himself sliding into indirection is a notable accomplishment—unlike many theoretical studies, his is readable and convincing . Transatlantic Insurrections expands our sense of both British and early American literatures. In its overall thesis and in its specific readings it is a powerful, important book. Richard Morton McMaster University Robert P. Irvine. Enlightenment and Romance. Bern: Peter Lang, 2000. 224pp. US$37.95. ISBN 3-906758-94-X. "'Oh! It is only a novel!'... Now, had the same young lady been engaged with a volume of the Spectator, instead of such a work." In her famous defence of the novel in Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen inadvertently lays the groundwork for Robert Irvine's study of what he calls in his subtitle Gender and Agency in Smollett and Scott. Along with the role of women in the development of the novel, Irvine echoes Austen's focus on the Spectator as a touchstone of Enlightenment discourse and outlines its move towards the feminine standards ofpolite conversation thatAusten ironically anticipates . Indeed, Austen's astute analysis sets out the parameters ofan ongoing debate on the nature and value of the novel. For Irvine, the chief contemporary debaters are Michael McKeon, Ian Duncan, and Ina Ferris, whose works—each a touchstone in its own way—provide the starting points for his own focused and well-informed contribution, which can be summed up as his attention on discourse and the feminine. Irvine sees himself as taking up the discussion at the point to which Duncan and Ferris, coming from their different directions, brought it— that is, at the point offemale agency. For Irvine, Duncan undervalued "feminine power" and "subjectivity." And Ferris helpfully dropped a "hint that REVIEWS181 female writing, rather than female reading, constitutes the defining other of Scott's historical realism"; Irvine aims to demonstrate "how this female authorship appears as a trope of authorship in general, including Scott's own" (p. 33). Irvine begins by considering the interrelated rise of Enlightenment discourse and that of feminine authority in the novel. He argues that, in the context of the Enlightenment conflict between the secular focus on human agency and the need to surrender agency to fulfil the social contract, Smollett, followed by Scott, posited "a space outside of historical determination ... in which the individual subject [gendered feminine by both] still has power to shape her life" (p. 9). Irvine sees Scott's role in turning the author's loss of political agency into the novelist's epistemological approach—using the novel as a means of knowing the historical world— as crucial to what has been seen as a lack of realism in his narratives, but can (as Duncan shows) be seen as a positive affirmation of romance as "expressing the Utopian aspiration to self-determination" (p. 29). Irvine's project , then, is, "by restoring gender as an operative category" in Smollett and Scott, "to show how they used romance plot to appropriate enlightenment discourse to produce 'the novel as we know it'" (p. 35). Irvine devotes his longest single chapter to Smollett's Roderick Random and Humphry Clinker, and three chapters to Scott. He argues that in Roderick Random, Smollett resolves satire in romance (p. 56), thereby helping to create the new category of the aesthetic which emerged to compensate writers for their "alienation from power" (p. 68) and then...