The Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth-Century Novel ed. by J.A. Downie (review)

It seems a daunting task to review a handbook to the eighteenth-century novel when scholars have spent the last several decades systematically dismantling both our understanding of the form and its relationship to that specific period. The sheer weight of the critical conversation hangs over the volume and its reviewer with every turn of the page. In response to this debate and the looming spectre of Ian Watt, editor J.A. Downie has chosen supplementation instead of confrontation: "Rather than concentrating on the novel's 'birth,' or 'origins,' or 'rise,'" Downie writes in the prologue, the handbook "aims simply to supply critical and contextual commentary on the long prose fiction which was published in English from the later seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries" (xxiii–xxiv).

As a vehicle for "critical and contextual commentary," the Handbook succeeds and occasionally even delights. Its two parts, divided chronologically pre- and post-1770, offer social, material, and literary context for subsequent discussions of particular authors and genres. These discussions of the wider culture of writing in the period remind us how cultural discourses shape a period's fiction. (One imagines a handbook to the twenty-first century novel with chapters devoted to social media memes and "think pieces.") The chapters that explore "Influences on the Early English Novel" proceed deftly through Continental, religious, and travel writing to culminate in Rebecca Bullard's spectacular chapter on "secret history." Alongside the thrill of imagining the eighteenth-century version of supermarket tabloid coverage, Bullard's chapter offers the reader an insight on the relationship between context and canon: "Analyzing the relationships between secret history and the novel illustrates the benefits of reading early novels in the light of contemporary non-literary or sub-literary genres like secret history, but it also reveals the dangers of such an approach ... Accounts that focus on the novel's development sometimes squeeze out or pass over distinctive literary characteristics of other contemporary genres that do not appear in the dominant examples of this period's prose fiction" (138). The Handbook attempts to avoid these dangers by highlighting other contemporary genres, and this section's chapters by Walter Reed, Gillian Dow, W.R. Owens, Cynthia Wall, and Bullard were, for me, the highlight of the volume.

This is not to say that the more traditional discussions of novels and novelists are not illuminating. The chapters on the usual suspects—Defoe, Swift, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne—are erudite and readable, if a bit easy to gloss over in search of something more revelatory. The Handbook as a whole is burdened by the obligation to cover the well-trodden ground for those readers who need the introduction, when it must also provide more robust literary context to move the discussion past Watt's now outmoded thesis.

Luckily, this fuller literary context is available in spades. Even those who have been working on and teaching the eighteenth-century novel for years will find fresh content and approaches here. For example, Simon Dickie's chapter on the novels of the 1750s posits an archeological response to a decade previously presumed to be "blank" and "a low point between the great works of Fielding and Richardson and the Tristram Shandy craze" (254). Dickie asserts that "to keep digging [in the decade's catalogue] is to find much that is predictable or derivative but also to marvel at all the variabilities and innovations" (256). His discussion of ramble novels is particularly marvelous. Come for the Edward Kimber novel, Life and Adventures of Joe Thompson (1750), with its winking reversal of the name of Fielding's hero Tom Jones; stay for the exploration of how "ramble novels thus confound some deep-seated assumptions about eighteenth-century fiction and how it was read" (262). Gary Kelly's chapter on the "popular novel" and assumptions surrounding it participates in an ongoing conversation about the gap between what is perceived as high-brow literary taste and what people...