An Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Fiction: Raising the Novel (review)

182EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION15:1 Enlightenment terms, must predominate over romance) (p. 119). This tension between plot and discourse does indeed seem central to the many tensions in an interestingly uncategorizable novel, and, for Irvine, reflects the "enlightenment embarrassment with narrative" (p. 123) which causes Scott to sacrifice his plot and, like Richardson and Burney before him, efface the feminine. Irvine moves from a complex and convincing analysis of Scott's second novel to examine what is arguably his most discursively interesting one, Rob Roy—and its outspoken heroine, Diana Vernon. The argument he has developed allows for a neat interpretation of this novel's failure to imagine a verbal, politically active heroine as a living wife, and of its elegiac first person narrative form as representing "the imagined death of the author himself (p. 174) . Irvine's final chapter shows how Scott in Waverley replaces female agency with üiat of the state and then, in TL· Heart ofMidlothian, figures the agency of the state and the author as a Queen, who stands on the border between the public and the private, history and fiction. In several ways, Irvine then shows, Redgauntlet takes up and resolves all of these discursive, generic, and political issues. For one thing, Lilias's "civilizing, feminizing dialogue," refusing to be effaced by party politics, provides a "moral example to the impolite male" (p. 209). Redgauntlet also refuses the male-centred appropriation of the community as an object of knowledge, constructing instead "a national community, united by an inherited culture " (p. 214). With the state here founding its authority on its role as a "creator of fictions" and a "refusal to know," it becomes a "figure for the novelist's own authority" (p. 215). Enlightenment and Romance is distinguished by consistently enlightening readings of Smollett and Scott in the context of the development of the novel, and its particularly valuable contributions come from the links Robert Irvine makes—between Smollett and Scott, between Enlightenment and romance, of course—and from his focus on discourse and its implications for narrative. (Ironically, the book would have benefited from more careful editing, since the number of flawed sentences, though not large, detracts from the flow of its own discourse) . Marilyn Orr Laurentian University John Skinner. An Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Fiction: Raising the Novel New York: Palgrave, 2001. xi + 314pp. US$65. ISBN 0-33377624 -0. In his preface, John Skinner observes that existing books on the rise of the novel tend to presume a knowledgeable readership, a scenario which, REVIEWS183 he also points out, is increasingly ideal rather than real. Skinner proposes to rectify this situation with "as reader-friendly a survey as possible" (p. x). Most teachers will concur with Skinner's assessment of the need for a readable , coherent, informative roadmap to help the uninitiated navigate their way through both the substantial body ofscholarship in this area and a large number of unfamiliar novels and authors. Regrettably, Skinner's book does not fully answer this need. An Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Fiction is divided into two sections. Part 1 provides an overview of scholarship about the rise of the novel from Ian Watt to the present, summarizes the history of canon formation, establishes a conceptual framework that focuses primarily on the gender/genre matrix, and tries out this framework in chapters on "two literary parabolas," Richardson and Fielding. Part 2 consists of a series of chapters on paired authors (Behn and Defoe, Sterne and Smollett, Lennox and Burney, Radcliffe and Godwin), ending with a final chapter on Jane Austen. Skinner here rather erratically picks and chooses among aspects of his conceptual framework to make points that, while interesting in themselves, are often contradictory and do not ultimately cohere as a guide to eighteenth-century fiction. The book is hampered by two fundamental problems and a number of lesser ones. First is the amount of territory covered, which far exceeds what is useful and is, in fact, confusing. Single points from a wide and spotty range of theoretical material are typically introduced briefly, employed once, and abandoned forever. Second, the book suffers from Skinner's surprisingly inflexible conceptual framework. Having established his opposition between traditional male, hieratic, literary...