The Nineteenth-Century Novel

30:1 Reviews the location of serial publications wUl be in debt to the ULVS. I have found it uniquely helpful about holdings in the New York metropolitan area. Fulton, Colee, and their assistants are to be commended for doing an excellent job. Joel H. Wiener City CoUege of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL Ruth Bernard Yeazell, ed. Sex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth Century Novel. Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1983-84. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. Cloth $10.00 Ruth Bernard Yeazell's editorship of this volume is intelligently conceived. She is concerned with collecting essays that deal not so much with the poetics of fiction as with what nineteenth-century economists, biologists, psychiatrists and sociologists have to teU us about nineteenth-century fiction. These essays offer, then, not close readings (the exceptions being those on Barchester Towers and "The Beast in the Jungle"), but considerations of the whole intellectual mileau sunounding the fiction of the century. The orientation is feminist, because feminist critics (as Yeazell points out in her brief introduction) were some of the first to ask why women had not published more, why critics had not examined history more acutely and why the interpretation of canonical texts was not questioned more skeptically. If one chose to characterize the tone of these essays, one might call it "suspicious," but suspicious in the best sense. These threads closely unite such diverse writers as Trollope, J. M. Barrie and Frank Norris. Still, this excellent collection of essays is maned by one fault which occurs over and over: a complexity of sentence structure so extreme that meaning seems almost deliberately obscured. Nearly all of the six contributors are at fault in this regard. Here is just one sentence from Mark Seltzer's essay on Frank Norris: They [the multiplicity of accounts of production that Norris offers] indicate as well how this very multiplicity and instability may ultimately function as a flexible and polyvalent textual mechanism of relays, conversions, and "crisis" management—as, in fact, a thermodynamic that forms part of the textual mechanism itself. (124) 120 30:1 Reviews Here is Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on Henry James: These taxonomies would mediate between the supposedly classless, "personal" entities of the ideological fictions and the particular, class-specified, economically inscribed lives that they influenced; and at the same time, the plethoric and apparently comprehensive pluralism of the taxonomies occluded, through the illusion of choice, the overarching existence of the double bind that structured them all. (154) These are by no means isolated examples. It is regrettable that writers so eminently qualified to be critics, as the six in this volume, are so beguiled by the technical terminologies of the various sciences that they bring to the study of literature. One can easily understand the hostility of novelists who see criticism as a self-generating organism alien to their own involvement with life. Despite this drawback, the collection remains distinguished; it cannot help but be a reference point for many scholars of the nineteenth century. In particular the essays on Daniel Deronda, on the role forgetting played in Victorian fiction, on Frank Norris, and on "The Beast in the Jungle" strike this reviewer as some of the best pieces yet encountered on these subjects. ELT readers may not be especially concerned with D. A. MiUer's "The Novel as Usual: Trollope's Barchester Towers," but he offers a finely thought-out analysis of Trollope's final failure as a serious artist: his refusal to see characters as in any way significant threats to the Victorian class system and religion. Trollope, Miller notes, was himself the policeman in his novels, refusing to admit that any alien values were thinkable. Miller's feminist approach is never overdone and he notes that it is the "social atheism" of the Stanhopes that is condemned, not the family's absence of genuine religious values. But Miller's condemnation of Trollope's marriage of convenience between the novel and the social order takes no account of the one Trollope novel that cannot be criticized in this manner, The Way We Live Now. The Stanhopes prostitute religion and Trollope...