A New Species of Criticism: Eighteenth-Century Discourse on the Novel (review)

REVIEWS 315 parla: chaque mot se lance en traits de flamme dans le cœur de Thaley, et achève de le subjuguer ; il veut donner les ordres à James [Fanny's father and his tenant]: il n'est plus le seigneur, le maître de Fanny, de la fille de son fermier; il laisse échapper quelques expressions mal articulées; Fanny l'avait troublé. Le lord s'en retourne, transporté d'amour" (p. 31). The equivalent scene in Sade can be called—excuse the pun but it captures the spirit of his rereading and rewriting—a coup defoutre. The villain Granwel speaks: "Apprends , mon ami, que, quand ce cœur de feu conçoit une passion, il n'est aucun obstacle qui puisse l'empêcher de se satisfaire ... la possession d'une femme n'est jamais flatteuse , pour moi, qu'en raison de la multitude de freins que j'ai brisés pour l'obtenir. C'est la chose du monde la plus médiocre que la possession d'une femme, mon ami" (p. 121). Delon places Florian's Selmours, nouvelle anglaise halfway between the other two stories and argues that, despite some major differences (the central character is a man, not a woman), it belongs in the same emotionally overwrought subgenre. While the point is partially valid, it ignores the more important fact that, situated between the sentimental Baculard and the darker Sade, Florian offers unexpected but welcome comic relief. His plot is articulated by a series of abrupt about-faces motivated by Selmours's naïve desire to be thought well of by all. Embodying misguided caprice rather than real villainy, Florian's story displays an irony and comic feeling that in fact unmask (deconstruct?) sentimental pretensions. Pickle, Selmours's eventual brother-in-law and general pain-inthe -neck, is a character right out of farce and a welcome change from the usual serious villains. Read together, these three stories are more entertaining, more enjoyable, and just plain better than when taken separately. It is a real pleasure to (re)discover them in their new context. Peter V. Conroy, Jr University of Illinois, Chicago Joseph F. Bartolomeo. A New Species of Criticism: Eighteenth-Century Discourse on the Novel. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994. 209pp. US$35.00. ISBN 0-87413-488-9. Joseph F. Bartolomeo argues that the most significant contribution critics make to the early English novel is their inability to agree on a consistent aesthetic platform. Novelists themselves are just as generously inconsistent in their own prefaces. The diversity and dialogism of the critical debate reflects and supports the heteroglossia of discourse so crucial to the development of the early novel: "Dialogue, within and among novelists and critics, favored options over absolutes, heterogeneity over consensus—thus enabling the genre that we twentieth-century readers think of as having risen in the eighteenth century to continue rising and to remain a genre in the making" (p. 161). Whereas a multiplicity of discourse may strengthen the novel, the multiple voices of his own chapters somewhat weaken Bartolomeo's work. The first half discusses the prefaces of many different novelists, from Congreve to Godwin, and the second half discusses the reviews of professional critics. Bartolomeo deals with novelists from Congreve to Defoe chronologically (except for Richardson, Fielding, and Johnson, who get a chapter to themselves), and he tackles the critics thematically with interspersed commentary on the prefaces of the later novelists. The result of the awkward multiple structures is that it is often difficult to compare what the novelists and the critics have to say about the same issues and about one another. More significantly, perhaps, the argument suffers from the 316 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 7:3 limited range of the critics under discussion. Whereas Bartolomeo searches far afield of the canon for the novelists' prefaces, he draws reviews almost exclusively from the Monthly Review and the Critical Review. Rival journals such as Gentleman's Magazine, London Magazine, and others often ran reviews which were every bit as revealing and influential. For example, Bartolomeo repeats the received wisdom that Johnson "offered the first significant comments on the comparative merits of Richardson and Fielding" (p. 1 1), even...