Institutions of the English Novel: From Defoe to Scott (review)

Reviews Homer Obed Brown. Institutions of the English Novel: From Defoe to Scott. Philadelphia: University ofPennsylvaniaPress, 1997. xxiii + 228pp. US$29.95. ISBN 0-8122-3383-2. The premise of Homer Brown's new book, as outlined in its preface and introduction and then stated again much more forcefully in its final chapter, is that "the linear history of the novel as having an 'origin' and 'rise,' the history we have been broughtup on, with its genealogies, lines ofdescent and influence, family resemblances , is itself a fictional narrative—a kind of novel about the novel" (p. 177). What Brown means, of course, is that the early history of the novel as written by Ian Watt (The Rise ofthe Novel, 1957) and Michael McKeon (The Origins ofthe English Novel, 1600-1740, 1987), is wrong—or, rather, that it is inadequate and misleading. The form as we now know it did not spring into life in eighteenthcentury England, fully defined and determined by the cumulative achievements of Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne, as Watt and McKeon would have us believe; instead, Brown claims repeatedly, the "new species of writing" (in Richardson's famous phrase) emerged in a multiplicity of "uncertain," "inchoate " forms variously promoted by these writers (p. ix), and it did not gain stability as a literary and more broadly cultural institution until the early nineteenth century , in the generation ofWalter Scott and Jane Austen. Boldly stated as it always is, Brown's premise is a sensible one. The difficulty with it is that, while he pursues it as a major new line of argument about the origins and development of the modern novel in English, it is not really new at all. Brown has been scooped, for others before him—most recently J. Paul Hunter (Before Novels, 1990), whom he mentions only briefly, and Margaret Anne Doody (The True Story of the Novel, 1996), whom he mentions not at all—have already written persuasively about the complexities of the form's early lines of descent, and the "lawlessness" of EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 11, Number 2, January 1999 236 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 11:2 eighteenth-century British fiction in particular has been a theme of much criticism published since the appearance of Watt's landmark work four decades ago. Nowadays no serious student ofthe period's narrative writing believes it achieved generic stability, and for some time a general consensus has prevailed concerning the stabilizing effects of what happened when Scott and Austen arrived on the scene. And so Brown's book, intelligent and interesting as it frequently is, simply does not measure up against its own claim of revisionist originality. Brown does add his own emphases to the story of the early novel, and while the effects of these are not always happy they do give his book what significance it has as an elaborated critical statement. Here a simple description of the book's contents seems called for. The preface and closing chapter frame a structure that features an introduction, which is mainly an elaboration of the prefatory statement of Brown's premise, with further elaboration of what he means by the term "institution(s)," followed by separate chapters devoted to (1) "letters and gossip" (p. 24) as means of disguise for early fiction-writers, who often denied the function of the imagination; (2) the "displaced self" in Defoe's novels; (3) Tom Jones and the matter of illegitimacy—the hero's own, and that of the form in which his author practised; (4) the extended episode turning upon the accidental discovery of a sermon by Parson Yorick in Tristram Shandy; and (5) Walter Scott's uses of both literary and political history in his own novels, and his role in institutionalizing the form as he edited the novels of others. Now, anyone who has kept up closely with criticism in the field ofearly fiction for the last thirty years will notice instantly that chapters 1 through 5 are simply recycled versions of essays Brown published earlier. (Chapter 1 appeared first in 1977, chapter 2 in 1971, chapter 3 in 1979, chapter 4 in 1984, and chapter 5 in 1980.) Even the introduction is a recycling job, for...