Leonora, Lydia et les autres: Etudes sur le (nouveau) roman anglais du XVIIIe siècle (Leonora, Lydia and the Others: Studies on the (new) Eighteenth-Century British Novel) by Alain Bony (review)

298 flies Jorik [the protagonist] back to Budapest he is having a conversation with the stewardess: ‘If you need anything just ring the bell.’ . . . ‘I will, answered I.’ ‘I beg your pardon?—turned the beautiful reddish-blond to me and when I stretched out my hand, I caught hold of the stewardess’.’’ That is just plain wonderful. Melvyn New University of Florida ALAIN BONY. Leonora, Lydia et les autres: Etudes sur le (nouveau) roman anglais du XVIIIe siècle (Leonora, Lydia and the Others: Studies on the (new) EighteenthCentury British Novel). Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 2004. Pp. 394. 25⫽ C. Mr. Bony has gathered some of his narratological writings from 1977 to 2000, those analyzing the links between formal statements made by authors and their fiction, in a splendid book that has been awarded the 2005 ‘‘prix de la recherche SAES/AFEA.’’ Authors are discussed chronologically to examine the developing perception of what Mr. Bony playfully calls ‘‘le (nouveau) roman anglais.’’ Under various guises in the spirited Prologue and Epilogue, the heroines of the title pop up from library scenes in order to reveal the tastes of the reading public: the Spectator’s Leonora reemerges in Joseph Andrews, Lydia appears in both Smollett and Sheridan, Lenox’s Arabella in The Female Quixote has a servant called Lucy just like the girl who gets books from circulating libraries for Lydia Melford. Romances and novels, serious works and trifles , worn-out books and wooden ones are jumbled in this ‘‘[r]ummage through the library’’ and in the final ‘‘The Eternal Return or the Insatiable Desire for Reading.’’ Exploring the relationship between ‘‘news,’’ ‘‘novel,’’ and ‘‘novelty’’ in the early periodical press, Mr. Bony argues that the way news was gradually fictionalized in the Tatler and the role given to readers from the beginning of the Spectator make Steele and Addison the initiators of reader-response theory. In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift ‘‘deconstructed in advance the diverse forms’’ of the genre to come. Emphasizing Defoe’s narrative insouciance and ‘‘false starts,’’ Mr. Bony shows how Defoe laid the foundations of the adventure novel with Captain Singleton, the historical novel with Memoirs of a Cavalier, both the sentimental novel and the educational novel with Colonel Jack, the roman à thèse with Colonel Jack and Moll Flanders, and the roman noir with Roxana. The Preface to Joseph Andrews, considered ‘‘poetics of the (new) novel,’’ is a springboard for Mr. Bony to consider Fielding and Richardson as a ‘‘paradoxical pair.’’ While Richardson legitimized his text by ‘‘exalting’’ it like its heroine, Fielding imposed his through ‘‘generic engineering,’’ forcing it into the literary tradition and foregrounding literature as a matter of textual structures rather than moral lessons. The same text can be read as both romance and novel. ‘‘The ambivalences of sentimentalism’’ argues that the Lockean primacy of subjectivity contains the seeds of Sade and examines how sentimentalism delayed and often thwarted this evolution. A much earlier, partly Lacanian reading of Sterne’s texts on the intertwining of sexuality and textuality is followed by a chapter on the texture of Tristram Shandy, ‘‘a book which displays in its middle a reminder of its medium in- 299 stead of its message,’’ and the marbled page, a metaphor sustained by references to squirts, knots, hinges, and seams. Smollett’s definition of the novel in Ferdinand Count Fathom provides ‘‘a generic norm of which individual works can only give impure and bastard illustrations’’(Tom Jones is the unmentioned standard). In Humphry Clinker, the ‘‘epistolary polyphony’’ puts the reader in the position of the ‘‘principal personage,’’ endowed with the same kind of unifying power as the narrator of Tom Jones, which illustrates in advance Henry James’s conception of the ‘‘novel as a living thing.’’ The Epilogue reluctantly ranks Richardson and Sterne above Fielding for the novelty of the new novel. In order to spare the heroines the sad destiny of Victorian ‘‘angels in the house,’’ Mr. Bony closes the library, having illuminated the eighteenth-century novel in a series of diffracted studies. Sadly, the library of his mind was untimely closed when he passed away on March 19, 2006. He was Emeritus Professor of English Literature, at the Universite...