Nation and Novel: The English Novel from its Origins to the Present Day by Patrick Parrinder (review)

131 chronicler of low life. Also irritating are the comparisons with modern ‘‘media darlings’’ and ‘‘micro-celebrities’’ (whatever the latter might be). In a book that very few nonspecialist readers will ever see, it is unnecessary to add ‘‘[sic]’’ after common eighteenth-century spellings like ‘‘antient’’ and ‘‘critick’’—but this may have been the decision of a Bucknell editor. More significantly, the interpretation is occasionally labored, for example where Mr. Gibson makes heavier weather of one of Pallet’s malapropisms (‘‘Potatoe domine date’’) than is probably justified. Similarly, it seems unfair at once to say that Smollett is critical in Humphry Clinker of the neo-Palladian ‘‘improvement’’ of the Baynards’s seat at the expense of its former, venerable Gothic appearance, and that the ‘‘the faux Palladian façade covers the ‘Gothic ignorance’’’ of its improver: this is having and eating one’s critical cake. And should one take at face value the equivalence of the creator with his crotchety narrator in the Travels or with Matt Bramble? To some degree at least, Smollett deliberately, consciously anticipates what Sterne later satirized as Smelfungian. Art and Money is well served by its plates in the early chapters, less so later on. In the same vein as the Critical Review appendix to Mr. Gibson’s book, there is an account of the illustrations for the Complete History of England and its Continuation—although it is too bad we could not have more reproductions than a rather meager pair. Eighteenth-century engravings of the Pantheon, the Medici Venus and Raphael ’s Transfiguration—the three works, as analyzed by Smollett, which are the subject of chapter 5—would not have been difficult to find or expensive to reproduce . Until very close to the end, this slender volume runs the risk of being a collection of interesting but not entirely connected observations—something of a ‘‘diffused picture,’’ to borrow a phrase. The author does manage to pull it all together in his final pages, however— even if only to conclude that Smollett was ambivalent about the contemporary art market, on the one hand seeing it as a means to improve the nation and on the other as the enabler of the extravagance and vulgarity that Bramble in Humphry Clinker finds in the architectural excesses of Bath. (How Clinker offers a healthy corrective to unquestioning modern devotion to the Georgian style.) Mr. Gibson’s pulling together comes in short order, it must be said, but on balance convincingly, and the result provides a valuable new perspective on an author who clearly has more to offer than the mere picaresque. Neil Guthrie University of Toronto PATRICK PARRINDER. Nation and Novel: The English Novel from its Origins to the Present Day. New York: Oxford, 2006. Pp. 512. $45. In Nation and Novel, the author of The Failure of Theory (1987) returns to the spirit of his earlier book by writing a theory-free overview of the English novel from Malory to Martin Amis. A survey does not have to sacrifice depth for coverage, but this one does so unapologetically since its audience is less the specialist than the genteel and general English country reader (an American will have to look up ‘‘whingeing Pom’’). Much of the book’s 400-page bulk is thus devoted to plot summaries and commentary, and this prevents it 132 from ever really rising to the level of argument . The book’s title will immediately suggest that its four chapters on the eighteenth century are out to join the family of recent work on the subject that includes the like of Suvir Kaul’s Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire (2000), Srinivas Aravamudan’s Tropicopolitans (1999), Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) and Linda Colley’s Britons: Forging the Nation 1701–1837 (1992). But Nation and Novel avoids its more theoretically inclined friends, and especially their premise that ‘‘nation’’ is an ‘‘imagined’’ construction built on an inside/outside trope of exclusion. Mr. Parrinder cites Colley in his Appendix on ‘‘Further Reading,’’ but in the four chapters only mentions her work once. Similarly conspicuous by their absence are Aravamudan and Marie Louise Pratt, both of whom have complicated our ideas of the subaltern. Anderson is...