The Emergence of the Modern German Novel: Christoph Martin Wieland, Sophie von La Roche, and Maria Anna Sagar (review)

REVIEWS327 recounts the dismal revival of religiously motivated censorship when the French Ministry of Information attempted in 1966 to suppress Jacques Rivette's film La Religieuse by banning it. Via comparison of this shameful episode with the reception of Diderot's novel, along with comparisons between the film and the book,Jackson also signally advances our understanding of an eighteenth-century novel and its cultural setting. A concluding Filmography and Bibliography add to die utility of Eighteenth -Century Fiction on Screen. Its pleasures are augmented by stills from the films, of which the most delightful is Parke's jolly selection of a picture showing Kim Novak as an irresistible Moll Flanders "savoring her first gift of jewelry in Terrence Young's TheAmorous Adventures ofMollFlanders" (p. 56). Eighteenth-Century Fiction on Screen is an indispensable book. It advances understanding of many eighteenth-century novels while also advancing understanding ofwhy we do and why we should continue to seek out both the novels and the films they inspire. The paperback edition of Eighteenth-Century Fiction on Screen should be a required text in all courses on the eighteenth-century novel. Paul Alkon University of Southern California Claire Baldwin. The Emergence ofthe Modern German Novel: Christoph Martin Wieland, Sophie von La Roche, andMaria Anna Sagar. Rochester, NY, and Surrey, UK: Boydell and Brewer/Camden House, 2002. 272pp. US$65/£45. ISBN: 1-57113-167-1. Claire Baldwin's promisingly tided book is based on a selection of material excavated from beneath the ornamental surface of official German literary history. Near the surface there is the once universally celebrated Wieland, slighdy lower down his sometime fiancée and literary protegee, Sophie von La Roche, and dien right down deep, the forgotten, but extremely interesting , fiction ofMariaAnna Sagar. The methodological aspiration ofthe study (and its scholarlyjustification) is to combine literary history with the study of women's writing. Baldwin makes important contributions in both diese areas. The main literary-historical achievement is to refine our sense ofthe manipulation , in the eighteenth century, ofdesires and conventions. She convincingly shows the importance of metafictional devices in the aesthetically increasingly ambitious fiction of the last third of the century. Reading pleasure must be provided, but also tiieoretically and practically compatible with virtue. The crucial role ofvirtue, or at least ofa discourse ofvirtue that produced the right results, also frames Baldwin's contribution in relation to 328 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION16:2 women's studies. Virtue evidendy made different demands on men and on women. This determined the rhetorical situation in which the male or female voice (or the voice presented as either male or female) could speak and be received. This line ofthought generates intelligent and lucid accounts ofdie two women writers, with Wieland as the relevant point of comparison. It is welcome to have extended analyses, benefiting from die mutual enrichment ofliterary history and women's studies, ofdiis shrewdly chosen group oftexts. In Don Sylvio von Rosalva and Geschichte des Agathon Wieland offers cunning advice about the application of fiction in real life. Baldwin is particularly sensitive to the way in which women characters—Felicia, Mencia, Hyacindie, Danae, and Psyche—offer Wieland the means to define and reflect upon different ways in which fictions and society can be thought of in relation to one another. Sophie von La Roche's Geschichte desFräuleins von Stemheimis an inflection for Germany and forwomen ofRichardson's epistolary sentimentalism . Baldwin praises this book for introducing, through the manipulation of differing kinds of telling and reading stories, an innovative openness of role possibilities for women, which subverts the conventional closure of the narrative. Sagar's Karolinens Tagebuch plays to a double audience in its portrayal ofhow "nothing happens" in the life ofa woman. Women must not be the subject oftoo interesting a narrative lest this compromise dieir virtue, but a woman who writes about her life as (nearly) empty has the complex rhetorical task ofat once speaking to other women, who will understand what this disavowal hides, and reassuring men that it hides nothing tiireatening to their cultural or aesthetic overview. The rewards ofBaldwin's gender-sensitive contextualization are particularly evident in her analysis ofWieland's preface to Sophie von La Roche's...