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Reviewed by:
  • Novel Minds: Philosophers and Romance Readers, 1680–1740 by Rebecca Tierney-Hynes
  • Gary Kelly
Rebecca Tierney-Hynes. Novel Minds: Philosophers and Romance Readers, 1680–1740. Palgrave Macmillan 2012. viii, 223. $110.00

Novel Minds examines the relationship between discussion of romance reading and empirical philosophers’ views of the imagination and subjective identity in what may be called Augustan modernity. The book is less interested in the history of generic distinctions between novel and romance than in the relation of a new (novel) philosophy of mind to the reading of fiction (generally, the novel) and the role of reading in the formation of the mind, or the modern subjective self. The book aims to explain “how the experience of reading romance, the ‘giddy Delight’, the pleasure and transport it induces, comes to be transferred to and transformed in philosophical explanations of how we experience the world.” Accordingly, the book engages “three major areas of recent study: the history and theory of reading; of emotion; and of the self,” especially recent academic interest in affect. Historicizing philosophical and theoretical formulations of the self from the Middle Ages to post-structuralism, the book finds and focuses on a shift in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century from a self constructed through bodily engagement with the natural and social world to one constructed discursively, through “text.” Elaborating on Delarivier Manley’s (plagiarized) defence of “modern” novels’ character portrayal and its engagement of readers, the book argues that the “process of coming to self-knowledge through reading the passions [of fictional characters] … causes us to want to read”: “We read in order to know ourselves; we know ourselves, and thus desire books.” But the new philosophical formulations of subjective identity, recognition or assertion of the importance of reading in subject formation, and the increasing practice of romance reading aroused cultural anxiety about the stability of the subjective self and stimulated attempts to police reading, especially of romances, that persisted through the century and beyond.

Originally a doctoral dissertation, Novel Minds offers the conventional formation of an introduction and five chapters, centred on Locke, Behn, Shaftesbury, Hume, and Richardson, though the range of reference is [End Page 239] much broader. And though closely argued and dense with quotations from and references to Augustan literature and recent theory and literary history, Novel Minds is clear, energetic, lively, and economical. The introduction lays the groundwork of the empiricist account of the self and mind and its relation to romance reading, elaborates the philosophical turn in the chapter on Locke, offers different philosophical approaches in the chapters on Shaftesbury and Hume, and illustrates the different practices of textual self-formation of and in Behn and Richardson. With Richardson’s epistolary Pamela, Novel Minds concludes, “the imagination has been reconfigured as a [Lockean] blank sheet of paper on which is written the text absorbed by reading, a text that both shapes the reading self, and allows a responsive textual production in turn.” Thus, the book relocates the emergence of interest in, accounts of, and concern with the relation of literature and the modern subject from the late eighteenth-century age of sensibility earlier to the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century.

Convincing in its own terms, Novel Minds nevertheless provokes further questions and speculations. At times the historical and historicized formation of a culture of novel minds seems needlessly or conveniently dematerialized, abstracted, or generalized, an idealized process whose proponents and practitioners are its instruments rather than actors or agents in particular times and places. The modernity that is discussed seems to be that legible now within the academy. The romances discussed were relatively upmarket. Gender difference and its relation to genre are discussed, but not other social differences, leaving modernity as a field of struggle between men and women of a particular class or rank. Other widely read fictions during the period (and beyond), such as Pilgrim’s Progress, Defoe’s novels, and street-literature chapbook fiction, with their readers and ideas of selfhood, are not discussed, presumably left unmodern, but arguably creating an alternative modernity and selfhood that persists in popular romance today. For many or most in the period, the secularizing drive of the...

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