Novel Ventures: Fiction and Print Culture in England, 1690–1730 by Leah Orr (review)

Leah Orr offers a meticulously researched and often scintillating account of the reception and publication of early eighteenth-century fiction. Orr's analysis of nearly five hundred works of popular fiction, those texts commonly available to the eighty per cent of readers not affluent enough to purchase exorbitantly priced novels, reveals a discrepancy between the forms of fiction studied and taught by scholars in the field and those the majority of the literate population were reading. Diverging from existing developmental studies of the English novel, Novel Ventures productively broadens the canvas of early eighteenth-century literature to argue that "fiction was determined by the economic realities of publishing and by what booksellers thought would sell" (270).

Novel Ventures will appeal mainly to scholars interested in early eighteenth-century book history, and "Part One: Fiction in the Print Culture World" offers an exacting account of the nomenclature used in title-pages, prefaces, and advertisements; the generic distinctions observed by contemporary booksellers; the significance of copyright legislation; and the relative importance of authorship as a marketing tool. The terminal dates of Novel Ventures produce especially rewarding insights on the relationship between copyright legislation and the kinds of fiction selected for publication. Orr insists that the primary significance of such legislation is the fourteen-year limitation placed on copyright holdings, a condition that encouraged booksellers to republish older works and to translate foreign works, such as Vicomte de Guilleragues's Five Love-Letters from a Nun to a Cavalier (1678) and Francois Fenelon's Telemachus (1699), which fell outside the jurisdiction of British copyright law. Given that reprinted and foreign works composed roughly half of the early eighteenth-century market for fiction, Orr calls for a reconsideration of the English literary canon, from one grounded in developmental suppositions about the novel's progression from rudimentary to more complex narrative forms, to one informed by the fiscal demands of eighteenth-century booksellers.

While Novel Ventures persuasively explains the popularity of trending texts as a reply to the economic considerations of early eighteenth-century publishing, it is less evident how such popularity reflects consumer demand for particular forms of fiction. The case studies of "Part Two: Fiction in England, 1690–1730" are, accordingly, less successful than the trenchant observations of part 1, offering comparative analyses and plot summaries as a way of inferring readerly interests from the thematic similarities of frequently reprinted texts. For example, Orr's monograph is strongest when arguing that the popularity of Antoine Galland's Arabian Nights (1706) and Montesquieu's Persian Letters (1722) results from the deployment of a unifying frame narrative. Rather than providing a more aesthetically pleasing experience for readers, the appeal of such paratextual elements was primarily pragmatic, permitting booksellers to easily print different editions of varying lengths. By employing a frame narrative, the individual tales of Nights and Letters could be removed or added without compromising the overall cohesiveness of the plot. By contrast, Orr's discussion of crime narratives struggles to explain the popularity of Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722) in relation to the disfavour of his The Fortunate Mistress (1724). Pinpointing the latter novel's lack of success in its avoidance of the recognized conventions of crime fiction, Orr insists that The Fortunate Mistress alienated its audience by neither offering clear motivations for its protagonist nor presenting coherent moral lessons to the reader. And yet, the apparent moral ambiguity and generic confusion with which Orr diagnoses The Fortunate Mistress's dis favour might equally apply to the popular Moll Flanders, not to mention Defoe's even more successful Robinson Crusoe (1719).

Turning to new fiction published during the period, Orr categorizes popular texts as either "Fiction with Purpose," which includes political fiction, moral satire, and religious fiction, and "Fiction for Entertainment," which includes crime narratives, adventure/travel narratives, and amorous tales. Orr's taxonomic approach seems somewhat arbitrary, and the decision to place, for example...