Eighteenth-Century Fiction & the Reinvention of Wonder by Sarah Tindal Kareem (review)

"A footprint materializes mysteriously on a deserted shore; a strawberry birthmark reunites a kidnapped child with his long lost parents. . . ." Examples of moments of wonder in eighteenth-century novels launch Ms. Kareem's argument that essentially "eighteenth-century fiction solicits wonder at and about the real, that is, at and about everyday experience." The argument has three important implications: it challenges the view that the process of secularization during the Enlightenment precludes the capacity for wonder (even though belief in the supernatural would diminish); it counteracts the association (pace Ian Watt) that the "rise of the novel" is associated with realism; and it theorizes wonder as an element of reader-response.

Building on Michael McKeon's work on the origin of the novel and Catherine Gallagher's views on the nature of fictionality, Ms. Kareem's main assertion is that eighteenth-century fiction solicits wonder at and about the real, that it discovers wonder in daily life. Ms. Kareem defines two kinds of wonder: wonder at, associated with astonishment, and wonder about, associated with curiosity. Both are usually intermingled, especially in reading fiction, so readers feel engrossed and skeptical at the same time, which is part of the aesthetic pleasure (they feel as though they witness events without believing in them as real).

Second, Ms. Kareem positions herself in the discussion that links the age of Reason to the "disenchantment" of the world by moving away from the binary opposition of these terms (wonder and reason) and questioning the whole notion of a shift from belief to skepticism in the eighteenth century. She sees the eighteenth-century novel as embracing both (suggesting that they are not mutually exclusive) and reaching "a balance between engrossment and reflection," so that fiction is read in a state of "ironic credulity." In line with other critics who espouse the "phenomenology of narrative enchantment" and turn to magic to find "an analogy for fiction's effects," Ms. Kareem sees a "new paradigm of fiction as enchantment" taking hold in the mid-eighteenth century, but argues that skepticism, rather than being antithetical, is actually a component of this wonder.

One of the main concerns of her book is to outline the "textual strategies" used to produce wonder when reading; there are four in particular: "delayed decoding . . . suspenseful plot devices; estranging descriptive language; and the switching between different narrative points of view," which allow her to "theoriz[e] wonder as a reader response." Hume and other Enlightenment philosophers, especially Scottish and German, are essential to her argument, as are Shlovsky and his concept of defamiliarization, Todorov and his theory of the fantastic, Iser and his reader-response theory, together with recent affect theory. The method adopted is to place realist works beside "more overtly fantastical ones," reading one in light of the other, in order to defamiliarize them and break down the apparent "dichotomy between realism and the marvellous."

Interesting pairings result. After the first chapter's theoretical model, the four subsequent chapters illustrate her four narrative strategies. Despite Watt's positioning of Defoe and Hume as representing "ideological opposites," Kareem presents them as aligned: both use the mode of Protestant spiritual autobiography and the image of the shipwreck, so Hume's philosophy can be seen as "a secular reinterpretation of Puritan spiritual anxiety." Fielding's Tom Jones and Walpole's Castle of Otranto may seem unlikely bedfellows, but both evoke a response of "engrossed suspense" in the reader to produce a gap "between belief and disbelief," and a "meta-fictional admiration" for the interconnections between things.

An outlier is the fourth chapter, intended to show what Ms. Kareem calls "artful fictionality," the deliberate and skeptically grounded suspension of disbelief induced by fiction that defamiliarizes the act of reading. The text chosen is Baron Munchausen's Narrative of His Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia (1785), a collection of travelers' tales attributed to a Hanoverian baron but actually written by philosopher Rudolph Erich Raspe. It is a curious...