Joyce's Grandfathers: Myth and History in Defoe, Smollett, Sterne and Joyce (review)

298 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 6:3 of the earlier chapters of that work [Political Justice] in conformity to the sentiments inculcated in this," and goes on to assert the vitality of "domestic and private affections," "the culture of the heart," and "individual attachments." Six years later (1805) Godwin published Fleetwood, and the significance of the novel's subtitle is hard to miss: "The New Man of Feeling." Godwin pulls back from the highly rational and systematic method oí PoliticalJustice (in this case, its treatment of marriage), telling the reader that the merit of Fleetwood "must consist in the liveliness with which it brings things home to the imagination." Finally, in his Essay on Sepulchres (1809), a work not mentioned by Clemit, Godwin details Mary Wollstonecraft's influence, personal and intellectual. Throughout the essay Mary Wollstonecraft's death is much on Godwin's mind, as we can see in his recollection that "The greatest of earthly calamities, and the most universal, is death. The calamity is perhaps greater to him that survives" (p. 8). He then defends the need for memorials by arguing that "if (to put the strongest case) I were so fortunate that the person worthy of all this encomium were the wife of my bosom, there is something in the nature of which we partake, that gives a value to such a possession beyond its abstract and intrinsic merits" (p. 13). Rejecting "the plan of regarding man as the mere creature of abstractions and mathematical or syllogistical deduction," Godwin asserts the centrality of "human imagination and human feelings" (pp. 3-4). The first halfofthis sentence about regarding man "as the mere creature of abstractions" is, in many ways, the pre-Wollstonecraft Godwin; the second half of the sentence, emphasizing "human imagination and human feelings," is the post-Wollstonecraft Godwin. Much as I find Clemit's book both challenging and enjoyable (and, regrettably, grotesquely overpriced!), I do not think a strong case can be made for the "Godwinian" novel without thoroughly considering the transition between the pre- and post-Wollstonecraft Godwin. Robert W. Uphaus Michigan State University John M. Warner. Joyce's Grandfathers: Myth and History in Defoe, Smollett, Sterne and Joyce. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993. xiii + 193pp. US$35.00. ISBN 0-8203-1495-1. One line of reasoning about the history of the novel always assumed that it is not a single form but a variety of diverse ones. If it is possible to trace a clear line of influence and descent from Richardson and Fielding, down through Lennox, Goldsmith, Burney, and Austen, what do we do with those works that seem, as Warner puts it, to be "hovering at the edge of the novel tradition instead of occupying its center" (p. 161)? Put another way, is it possible to discern a positive and alternative principle, not closely related to the achievement of the regular action, organizing the works of Defoe, Smollett, and Sterne, three writers who among them wrote not a single work that is satisfactorily explainable by reference to the form as developed by Richardson and Fielding? John M. Warner provides an answer to this question by seeing a similarity of ontological concern between these three earlier novelists and the greatest of twentieth-century nontraditional novelists, Joyce. If, as Warner contends, these earlier authors "enact in extreme forms ... those acts of disjunction and mediation that all novels perform," might we not use their works to help explain the task of a much later novelist profoundly dissatisfied with the realist model of the novel? REVIEWS 299 Warner's thesis involves demonstrating first that Defoe, Smollett, and Sterne, in addition to being outside the mainstream of the development of the novel (the implications of which I wish Warner had more fully treated), exhibit a common resistance to "an encroaching positivism and empiricism" that takes the form of a "revolutionary nostalgia for myth" and, second, show at the same time "a clear responsiveness to historical circumstances " (p. 2). It is this binary, ultimately thematic, view of all four authors as mediating between the attractions of myth and the horrors of history that informs Warner's readings of the novels. He locates the myth/history paradigm in...