The British Novel, Defoe to Austen: A Critical History (review)

Reviews John Allen Stevenson. The British Novel, Defoe to Austen: A Critical History. Twayne's Critical History of the Novel. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1990. xiii + 153 pp. US$20.95. Hard-core bibliographers may hasten to j'udge books by their covers, but budding scholars of the novel, the likely audience for John Allen Stevenson's synoptic study, would be well advised to taste the pith before the peel. As befits a book suffused with citations from Paradise Lost, The British Novel merits salvation despite itself. One bite of Stevenson's compote leaves the intellectual gourmet lusting after a larger slice of the apple of knowledge. A more extensive sample shows that Stevenson gradually repairs his initial blunders, falling fortunately into a fine work that leads to a hundred happy conclusions. Stevenson's efforts to characterize an entire literary movement through focused readings of six eminent authors is both commendable and in keeping with the aphorizing habits of his era. Scholars really do not need another detail-drunken book disputing the claims of Cervantes, Marivaux, Nashe, or Richardson to proprietorship over the novel. They do need the overall sense of the novelistic mat Stevenson provides. Stevenson, alas, contravenes his project by billing his briefly evocative book as a "history," a word that has come to suggest the annals-intensive writing of a Schonhorn, a Backscheider, or a McKeon. At most, Stevenson's book offers a softly sensitive history. Selectively centrist , it sends to the doghouse rough-edged, masculine bounders such as Smollett's picaros while also avoiding such lower emotional extremities as gothicism and sensibility (even Ann Radcliffe gets rebuffed for consuming too much critical space). The art of initial presentation eludes Stevenson. Forgetting the odious Augustan connotations of the term, Stevenson brags about his neo-Mackenzian "enthusiasm" for his subject (p. ix). He swoons over the "exciting" title of The New Eighteenth Century, a work whose reputation slides by the day (p. 3). This forgivable paean to contemporaneity , unfortunately, leads into a graceless swipe at Samuel Richardson's biographers , Ben Kimpel and T.C. Duncan-Eaves (pp. 3-4). Stevenson boasts of applying the EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 4, Number 1, October 1991 70 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 4:1 latest critical methods (never asking whether "the latest" is the proper domain for an introductory book), yet readers will find only familiar, canonically "new" approaches, from Freud to Bakhtin. Desperate to make his admirably curatorial work sound revolutionary , he decides to "celebrate the diversity" of his form, settling on the buzz-word of the day and seeking topicality in vague abstractions—"power in Clarissa," "language in Tom Jones," and even "laughter in Tristram Shandy." His own protestations aside, Stevenson's strength lies in his specificity. Once over die introductory matter, he speaks a language accessible to students and amusing to professionals . Tristram Shandy, for example, has long resisted die simplicity of explication that its fool-hero seems to advocate. Better-humoured than earlier Sternians, Stevenson sketches an absorbing history of early-modem attitudes towards "disfiguring" laughter. Stevenson's preachy but peachy Sterne achieves an unprecedented reconciliation of didacticism with delight, of dulce with utile (pp. 67-68). Stevenson may give too much credence to claims that Jonathan Swift never laughed; he may take Thomas Hobbes's condemnation of hilarity too literally; yet his merry credulity is redeemed by his brilliant, sympathetic account of the "laughter of feeling" (pp. 73-74) of that bittersweet comedy in which, for example, die Shandys' sexual bumblings can triumph over time and mortality because scatterbrained Mr Shandy forgets to wind up his clock (p. 78). "The interruption ofclimax ... is our reward" (p. 81), chirps Stevenson, a critic not afraid to say, in our era of new-historical oppression-mongering, that laughter feels good (p. 89). Stevenson loves good quips; of Tom Jones, he jests diat "everyone in the novel wants either to sleep with him or adopt him" (p. 57). More sober but no less stunning is Stevenson's reading of Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto. Granted, there is nothing alarming about Emst Kantorowicz's theories concerning the two bodies of kingship (Stevenson seldom distinguishes the old from the new, with the...