Novel Beginnings: Experiments in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (review)

Patricia Meyer Spacks has made a habit of posing fresh questions—and offering fresh responses—to familiar issues. From her foundational work on Frances Burney and eighteenth-century female subjectivity to her trans-historical investigations of boredom and gossip, her interrogation of intellectual problems is precise and thoughtful. Though such has long been Spacks’s modus operandi, Novel Beginnings: Experiments in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction contains not so much a set of questions and responses as an unconventional and dynamic method of reading fiction.

Offered as a resource for nonspecialists, Novel Beginnings initiates readers into the delights of eighteenth-century British literature. Accordingly, Spacks’s opening chapter, “The Excitement of Beginnings,” assuredly embraces the variety, exuberance, and strangeness of eighteenth-century novels and makes plain the author’s reluctance to attribute totalizing significance to these qualities. Insisting that her text simply “tell[s] a story” about the richness of eighteenth-century fiction (26), Spacks disavows the desire to definitively plot the development of the novel. Instead, she charts specific novels on an axis of possibilities that shifts between “the imagined poles of realism and fantasy” (23). In this spirit, Spacks forgoes scholarly notes and names in the text only five contemporary literary critics who have substantially impacted the field: Ian Watt, Michael McKeon, J. Paul Hunter, Nancy Armstrong, and Catherine Gallagher (4). Spacks offers no direct engagement with competing readings of texts or of broadly constructed historical arguments; instead, she appends a list of suggested readings organized by chapter. Her goal is not to be exhaustive or even necessarily representative in her analyses, but to “recapture the multiplicity of eighteenth-century fiction” and to “celebrate the act and process of reading” (4), in the hope of bringing to life “the vitality and daring of the early fictional enterprise and to suggest the rewards that eighteenth-century fiction offers its modern and postmodern readers” (26–27).

Though ostensibly aimed at a wider reading audience, Novel Beginnings nevertheless interrogates the shape and direction of contemporary eighteenth-century literary studies. In stating that literary history’s “organizational principles” sap the “flavor of individual works” and muddy “their idiosyncracies” (24), Spacks positions her text in opposition to a large body of scholarly and pedagogical work that relies on systematic interpretations. While not directed at any specific text, author, or methodology, the observation carries a sting. Novel Beginnings’s heuristic structure—seven porous categories of novel types that are designed to “facilitate comparison”—will admittedly “flatten some of actuality’s diversity for the sake of coherence and economy,” but much less so, it is implied, than the “retrospective impositions” of most literary history (26, 4, 23).

Even so, the tone and substance of Novel Beginnings are inviting in large part because Spacks deftly generalizes each of the issues that frame her discussion. For example, her discussion of eighteenth-century cultural contexts enumerates over a dozen familiar social factors (among them urbanization, a variety of marketplace pressures, empire-building, population growth and improved health conditions, rising marriage rates, the emerging middle ranks, and a focus on human liberties) that “impinged upon, even helped to determine, the shape of the evolving novel” (5). To these forces, she adds observations about new attitudes towards what mattered in fiction (12–14) and authors’ divergent employments of pacing, plot, detail, and realistic and fantasy modes (18–21). Maintaining a panoramic view of these various conditions—and sidelining the contests of literary history leaves Spacks free to treat each novel as a unique experiment with features that, finally, are irreducible to any one category. She seeks to expose, through the process of reading and comparing novels, the artificiality and insufficiency of using heuristics, even those that organize her own discussion: out of this process, she posits, a new way of reading texts might emerge.

To that end, Spacks enumerates eight subgenres of the novel, devoting a chapter to each. The categories/chapter titles are “The Novel of Adventure...