The Rise of the Historical Novel (review)

REVIEWS 83 Austen's texts are constantly diverting, but the authors' arguments and conclusions take much of the gloss off üie freshness of Üie interdisciplinary moment. John Halperin Vanderbilt University John MacQueen. The Rise ofthe Historical Novel. Edinburgh: Scotdsh Academic Press (The Enlightenment and Scottish Literature, Vol. 2), 1989. vii + 292pp. US$31.95. The title of John MacQueen's book, with its traditional use of "Historical," is an index to a substantial shift in criticism. Since 1980 readers and critics have been reminded by New Historicists that all novels, all texts, are historical, or historically embedded, and that a novel set "sixty years since" is no more intrinsically historical than is a novel purporting to represent its author's present. For the New Historicists and those influenced by them, writers and readers are always historically and socially determined, and the texts they produce and consume act in üie world and upon üie world. Texts and readings of texts are contestatory versions of a Real always there but always resistant to representation. This sort of historicism prefers a structure of ideological assumptions governing the production of texts of which the author is unaware. The historicist critic's task is to display me actions of these assumptions in the text and in the world of its reception. The "naïve" text, which understands itself as representing the real, is a lure to such readers, while texts betraying an awareness of üie contingency and interestedness of their claims on die real tend to repel. In this the New Historicism distinguishes itself from earlier marxisant projects that privileged the text's consciousness of the historical processes from which it emerged. Hence, Walter Scott and his "invention" of the historical novel, lionized by Georg Lukács and his inheritors, have been left in peace by New Historicists. There is no mention of New Historicism in MacQueen's volume. Indeed, the volume's citations and bibliographical notes pay scant attention eidier to general critical movements or to recent studies of Scott or of Üie book's other key figures, John Gait and James Hogg. There is, however, reference to Lukács, whose "account of Scott," notes MacQueen, "unfortunately combines occasional brilliant insights with a profound ignorance of Scottish literary and historical circumstances. He is nevertheless entirely accurate when he observes that 'What is lacking in the so-called historical novel before Sir Walter Scott is precisely die historical, mat is, derivation of the individuality of characters from the historical peculiarity of their age'" (p. 7). In this interplay of general theoretical agreement and sense of specific lack MacQueen finds and defines his own subject: to account for the emergence of historical fiction in early nineteenth-century Scotland and to detail the variations in response to the conditions permitting tiiis emergence of three major figures. What separates tiiis project from a New Historicist analysis, however , is MacQueen's emphasis on his autiiors as fully conscious historical and literary agents. Scott, Gait, and Hogg write; they are never written. MacQueen attempts to situate Scott, Gait, and Hogg both wim reference to their individual historicizing procedures and techniques and with reference to the authors as subjects of history Uiemselves. Essential to these acts of placing is the Enlightenment, which MacQueen understands in its specifically Scottish variant. "The Scottish Enlightenment ... consistently underplayed the importance of systems based on pure reason, and tended to emphasize the limitations of intellect and the importance of the nonrational passions and emotions in its account of the human mind" (p. 12). In declining a 84 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 4:1 faidi in pure reason, and thus refusing to accede to the implications of a static ideal of society that come with it—reason yielding always the same truths—die Scottish Enlightenment was able to perceive and isolate those passional impulsions that create individuals as dynamic historical agents. It was able also to comprehend and represent Üie passional component in structures of belief, to focus, tiiat is, on the passions that make the ideas that make history. MacQueen's volume has yet anotiier task, tiiough, diat of asserting "that diere was no absolute break separating earlier Scottish literature from that of the Enlightenment" (p. 37...