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Reviewed by:
  • Literary Historicity: Literature and Historical Experience in Eighteenth-Century Britain
  • Philip Smalwood
Ruth Mack , Literary Historicity: Literature and Historical Experience in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). Pp. vii, 230. $50.00.

In chapter 1 of Literary Historicity Ruth Mack quotes the extraordinary and moving passage from Johnson's preface to his Dictionary of the English Language in which the English lexicographer reflects on previous, failed attempts to regularize the languages of Europe and contrasts the situation of the Italian academicians and the "embodied criticks of France" with the "gloom of solitude" (43) in which he conducts his own linguistic enquiries. "Johnson," Mack's commentary then informs us, "is . . . not merely retreating to the personal here; he is using the terms of feeling, well established by mid-century as a way of defining authorship, in order to interrogate the relation between the experience and his project of knowledge in the Dictionary" (44).

"Using the terms of feeling. . . ." It is not that this historicizing interpretation of Johnson's utterance or his putative debt to the "mid-century" is exactly inaccurate here, or any way unscholarly in itself. Nor is Mack undutifully disrespectful of earlier scholarship: "if Johnson puts pressure on Foucault's account of authorship (as employed by Armstrong and Tennenhouse) it is because he is so very close to it" (44). Anyone can see that this reading of Johnson exhibits the imagination necessary to the historical sense, and that it can be combined with a [End Page 289] sharp awareness of recent theorizing. The combination is central to the purposes of this new volume on history, historiography, and eighteenth-century literature, and it is one of its strengths. But the way of making the point, and the mode of Mack's own writing of the literary history in which Johnson's emotions flow over into the text in the improbable context of his Dictionary preface, seems unsuccessfully wooden. It lacks the imaginative inwardness with the literary subject that is commended throughout the volume as an aspect of fictional history and history in fiction. Mack is so far at this crucial point unable to break through the lumpy rhetoric of contemporary scholarly exposition that the disability finds itself displaced to Johnson. The effect, which is unintended I am sure, is to make Johnson's own emotional life appear a more mechanical, self-conscious matter than the thesis of the whole volume requires it should be. Thus, Mack tells us, Johnson "enacts feeling as a way of elaborating the author's [i.e., his own] functionality" (44). But the lack of finesse in these formulations, at the very moment when the commentator is aiming to evoke the personal quality of Johnson's painful witness to his own emotional state, temporarily disarms Mack's wholly admirable and otherwise highly impressive, theoretical aims. The critical register, tone, and touch of Literary Historicity are at this point seriously unstable.

That said, there is much to be learned from this interesting new work of theory. Its argument is intertwined with literary commentary, criticism, and literary history—the problem of "how literary texts are to be characterized as historical objects" (169). If the book lacks a certain suppleness of style, the exposition at the level of the paragraph or the page is almost always clear, and consistently workmanlike. Mack is interested in the generically varied ways in which historical thinking, and a philosophy of history, manifest themselves in the literature and historical writing of the eighteenth century, and although the local statements of intellectual aims move about from one chapter to the next, the thesis of the whole volume, though slow-paced and digressive, is convincingly grounded; the examples, from Johnson, Fielding, Sterne, Walpole, Warburton, and Gibbon, are at the same time highly pertinent and thoroughly explored. The seeming randomness of this choice of authors and texts is more than redeemed by the surprising and fruitful examinations of familiar material in an unfamiliar context and powerfully makes the point about the diffusion of historical intelligence. Mack's dwelling on the theory behind the practice of literary history is timely and brings to the particular problem of eighteenth-century study some of the broader...

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