In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

REVIEWS 89 desire. After reading Yeazell's analysis, one must agree with her assertion that "Wives and Daughters offers a virtual compendium of the strategies by which the English novel has traditionally managed to represent the young woman's courtship" (p. 199). Part 3 consists of two short chapters on male, scientific appropriations of modest fiction. Darwin and Ellis both depend on modest conventions, Darwin because "he can take the lesser desire of the female serenely for granted" (p. 223) and Ellis "in associating woman's modesty with her desire, in claiming that it is the apparently timid woman who is secretly the most ardent" (p. 235). Moreover, says Yeazell, the sympathetic responses of these male scientists also suggest how much the modest heroine, because of the complexity with which novelists presented her, becomes a subject in her own right. Such an ending to Yeazell's compellingly chronological narrative strikes just the right note; one awaits the sequel. Tara Ghoshal Wallace George Washington University H. George Hahn, ed. The Country Myth: Motifs in the British Novelfrom Defoe to Smollett. Vol. 4, Britannia: Texts in English, ed. Jürgen Klein. Frankfurt am Main, Bern, New York, Paris: Peter Lang, 1991. US$56.80. ix + 276pp. ISBN 3-631-42673-9. The editor of this anthology has assembled twelve previously published articles dealing with aspects of eighteenth-century fiction, introduced by his own piece, "The Country Myth and the Politics of the Early Georgian Novel," in which he claims that they all share certain images and motifs which coalesce into a myth which underlies and shapes the "classic" (that is, canonical) novels of the period. In his essay George Hahn offers his revision of previous treatments of the "rise of the novel," predictably taking as his point of departure a slight distortion of Ian Watt's study, and adding Frederick Karl's The Adversary Literature as another target. In a footnote he includes Arnold Kettle's Introduction to the English Novel, and cites Michael McKeon's Origins of the English Novel as a more compelling "progressive" approach, but does not mention such other relevant books as those of Lennard Davis and Nancy Armstrong. Against sociological, cultural, or Marxist versions, which read the novels as reflections of middle-class or proletarian values, he proposes a political interpretation, arguing that in fact the dominant attitudes and assumptions in these works are those of the opposition Country Party and its espousal of the conservative ideals of the landed gentry. Thus, far from being realistic or subversive, these prose fictions represent nostalgic longing for an imagined past. Drawing on the work of recent historians such as Lawrence Stone, J.C.D. Clark, J.G.A. Pocock, and W.A. Speck, he summarizes the political situation of the period and the philosophy of the Country Party, its opposition to city financial and mercantile interests and its emphasis on traditional virtues vested in the landed gentry, the clergy, and me country life. These ideas he finds reflected in the fiction of Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett, as well as in some of their other writings. They adopt favourable attitudes to the country, are critical of the city (particularly London), attack luxury, and praise the country house. If some of their noVels do not literally end in the country, they do so figuratively, and their plots usually involve the movement of a young hero from the corrupt city to a happy ending in the country. 90 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 5:1 Of course, as Hahn acknowledges, other influences apart from the proposed political ones helped shape these narratives: the long tradition of attacks on the city—from Hesiod, Theocritus, and Virgil on—the romance convention of happy closures, and belief in the role of divine Providence in shaping destiny. Rather than considering these as undercutting his thesis, however, he sees them, with their powerful associations, as adding power to the creed of the country Party expounded in the novels, which thus become an adjunct to party propaganda. Given that these writers had in common certain conservative anti-Walpole views that would lead them to sympathize with the general attitudes of opposition "country" groups, how convincing is the thesis that...

pdf

Share