A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture (review)

This new companion to the English novel posits itself as an ideological successor to Laura Brown and Felicity Nussbaum's The New Eighteenth Century (1987) in being a counterpoint to "traditional collection[s] of essays on the novel" in that it "is not concerned with providing a tidy history, but rather with exploring the diverse and often unsettling contexts that inform the genre" (2). Yet such a description equally applies to previous companions, including John Richetti's Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel (1996), The Columbia History of the British Novel (1994), John Bender and Deidre Lynch's Cultural Institutions of the Novel (1996), and most of the other Cambridge companions to non-eighteenth-century novels, and so captures the main drawback to this companion (not really a serious one overall): it overstates its case, boldly going where others have gone before—"remind[ing] us how the private is the political" and "resist[ing] the teleological, progressive story of the rise of the novel, as well as the claimed superiority of realist fiction" (8). Nevertheless, editors Paula R. Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia have assembled an impressive collection of authors (twenty-four including themselves) visiting or revisiting a complex cultural topography. Ingrassia's introduction usefully and briefly covers novel histories from the early twentieth century to Ian Watt's intellectually recuperative Rise of the Novel (1957) to the more recent work of Nancy Armstrong, Ros Ballaster, Terry Castle, Lennard Davis, Catherine Gallagher, J. Paul Hunter, Michael McKeon, Janet Todd, and William Warner, among others.

The Companion is then sorted into three main parts: "Formative Influences," "The World of the Eighteenth-Century Novel," and "The Novel's Modern Legacy." Each essay cross-references other related essays, and each supplies a short list of further reading. The essays are intended to "challenge, revise, or resist previous inquiries into the eighteenth-century novel" (1), and some do this quite well. Robert Markley kicks things off with a reassessment of Defoe's Crusoe trilogy as a "self-conscious rejection of the interlocking discourses of 'psychological realism,' economic self-sufficiency, and one-size-fits-all models of European colonialism" (26): the spectre of Chinese trade superiority haunts western conceptions of identity in the Farther Adventures and Serious Reflections. Srinivas Aravamudan and Ros Ballaster also work to redress the balance that non-English and non-European cultures and fictions are seen to have on the "English" novel. After a rather heated discussion of the etymology and currency of the term "novel" (the "artificial unity of a so-called eighteenth-century English or British novel"—the title of this volume notwithstanding—"is a nationalist and xenophobic project" [50]), Aravamudan treats in some detail the surveillance chronicle "as a particularized pan-European translatio" (55) in the early eighteenth century, until "the gates of domestic realism begin to clang shut" (68). Ballaster continues her valuable work on the presence and influence of the oriental tale, faux or otherwise. She makes the excellently nuanced point that fiction in early eighteenth-century Britain was, like Indian muslin or Chinese porcelain, a "fabricated import, hybrid construction," which is "not to abandon the argument about the 'national' character of the novel in Britain, but rather to recognize that it could be taken as a measure of the strength and adaptability of an emergent 'Britishness' that it could speak from and of the place of the 'other'" (76).

The best essays in the volume tend to be those driven by new research—where the archives prompt real sea changes of perception and assumption. One of the most truly original and useful essays in the book is Kathryn King's "New Contexts for Early Novels by Women: The Case of Eliza Haywood, Aaron Hill, and the Hillarians, 1719–1725." King's extensive archival research for her forthcoming biography of Haywood will expand our critical as well as cultural appreciation for Haywood's formal...