The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 by Michael McKeon (review)

Book Reviews89 biography and history to theoretical argument and analogy. It would take more explanation than Loizeaux provides to see how the aesthetic of a Rossetti or Dulac picture was a "non-mimetic" one. Loizeaux's extended analogy to the "sculptural" quality of the later poems relies on questionable (though fascinating) assumptions about the experience of viewing sculpture; because of this the last chapter grows strained as it moves away from Yeats' own fairly general pronouncements about sculptural art. William Butler Yeats came from a family of artists and craftspersons. Though Yeats gave up art early in his life, Yeats and the Visual Arts shows that there was a vital link between his study of painting and statuary and the development of his poetry and theory. DAVID FALDET College of Idaho MICHAEL MCKEON. The Origins of the English Novel, 16001740 . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. 529 p. Michael McKeon argues that the full-fledged novels written by Richardson and Fielding in the 1740s are the climactic literary response to a cultural crisis that dates from the beginning of the seventeenth century. He identifies his study as extending the work of Ian Watt in The Rise of the Novel, focusing particularly on issues Watt left unresolved, the "persistence of romance and the aristocracy" (4). McKeon offers a Marxist explanation of the destabilization of both romance and aristocracy and then shows how the novel develops out of those instabilities. The "reigning narrative epistemology" before the seventeenth century was "romance idealism." During the seventeenth century, this narrative epistemology was challenged by "naive empiricism," which denies the epistemological validity of romance. But naive empiricism generated its own "countercritique," "extreme skepticism," which denies the validity of both of its precursors without itself providing a new narrative epistemology. Thus the old reigning narrative form, romance, was destabilized but not replaced. The reigning social view before 1600 endorsed a hierarchy in which birth and rank reflected worth: "aristocratic ideology." This was challenged by "progressive ideology," which generated its own countercritique, "conservative ideology" (21). The result, again, is a destabilized category, aristocracy, without a replacement. The eighteenth-century insight that these two crises — one literary and intellectual, one social — are analogous, are in fact versions of each other, is the "enabling foundation of the novel" (22). The novel "internalizes the emergence of the middle class and the [social] concerns that it exists to mediate" because these are analogous to the epistemological concerns that the new narrative form itself exists to mediate (22). Richardson and Fielding offer conflicting versions of this new fusion of form and function. McKeon provides a coherent account of the long-term cultural change from romance to novel, and he offers very good readings of some classic texts. The cost of such breadth of purpose is that he relies on sweeping assumptions and generalizations, sometimes without adequate evidence and analysis. The problem is partly offset by his extensive and thorough scholarship . And few critics have described this sweeping cultural transition that 90Rocky Mountain Review we all acknowledge as clearly as McKeon does. His readings of a variety of texts from the seventeenth through the mid-eighteenth centuries are fresh and imaginative. Even where his readings are similar to those of earlier Marxist critics (in discussing power struggles in Pamela, for example), he goes well beyond what earlier critics have said. His readings of Don Quixote and Pilgrim 's Progress are especially helpful, and his discussion of the conflict between Richardson and Fielding, and his argument that they reverse positions later in their careers, is new and intriguing. McKeon's tripartite, dialectical argument unnecessarily controls the shape of his text. The book is divided and subdivided into triads, as he strains for a structural version of the dialectical pattern. It becomes more than a "subliminal presence" (1), intruding without adding significantly to his argument. More problematic are the split between historical background and literary analysis and the lack of analysis of novels. Over half the book is devoted to background before the significant texts are introduced in part three. While the third chapter of each of the first two parts (a split in itself) offers some analysis of texts, they are pre-novel genres. And...