When Novels Were Books by Jordan Alexander Stein (review)

What do eighteenth-century scholars make of the fact that, as Jordan Alexander Stein’s crisp, refreshing monograph reminds us, “Novels were also books” (6)? For Stein, not nearly enough. When Novels Were Books asks its readers to reorient themselves to an historical period when reading relied as much on format as on contents, as much on design as on cultural encouragement (or injunction). To achieve this reorientation, Stein reminds his readers of the physical properties and international circulation of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century books, especially those printed in octavo, duodecimo, or sextodecimo, which “could easily fit into a pocket, making them the kind of books one could carry around and peruse in a spare moment” (56). Stein places before our eyes something he believes “would have been fairly obvious to eighteenth-century readers” (3): the way format announces genre in printed books before the nineteenth century. The payoff for this reminder comes in our newfound capacity to perceive the formal resemblances among texts that already share design features, particularly Protestant writing and prose fiction. Stein’s own book is a clarifying, pleasurable read, one that offers a model for how attention to a period’s larger media ecology can unstick adherence to anachronistic categories.

In four chapters and a short conclusion, Stein advances three ambitious theses: first, that the emphasis on reading for character associated with the genre of the novel is found initially in Protestant confessional and soteriological writings. The form of character derived from those writings is, for Stein, a “negative figuration” (10) found first in Augustine— dispossessed and vulnerable before God (chapters 1 and 3). Second, Stein contends that the shift from discontinuous to continuous reading that occurs at the turn of the eighteenth century coincides with the centrality of reading for this vulnerable character across a range of texts—fictional and biographical, secular and not (chapter 2). Following from the first two theses, Stein contends that “novels were not historically secular” (9), and only came to be seen as such because of the eventual separation of and competition from religious publishing that occurs in the 1790s (chapters 3 and 4). While Stein’s timeline for the consolidation of what was only belatedly termed “the novel” in the late eighteenth century would not surprise scholars of the genre, his attention to shifts in religious publishing reveals a new and important actor during that period of canonization. And When Novels Were Books as a whole amply displays the widely shared terrain (material and formal) of eighteenth-century Protestant writings and prose fiction.

Chapter 2, “The Character of Steady Sellers,” which was my favourite chapter, forms the heart of Stein’s subtle historical argument, one that convincingly favours continuity over sudden transformation. Chapter 2 details how discontinuous reading was encouraged by the format of seventeenth-century devotional texts, which remained in print because of reliable, continuous sales. As Stein explains, like Bibles, steady sellers were codexes that featured ornamental designs inviting readers to dip in and out of the text. Yet, while this encouragement might put the reader in control, Stein argues that this control is mitigated since readers were instructed to read “as if they were sent down from God to the reader” (72). These injunctions create a vulnerable, diminished reader. Ultimately, Stein assigns no single cause to the transition from discontinuous to continuous reading that occurs toward the end of the seventeenth century, but suggests steady sellers “accommodate” (79) this kind of reading by presenting more narrative plots, even as they retain their goal of readerly salvation via the negatively figured character. Stein illustrates that both The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) and Robinson Crusoe (1719) combine the new trend toward continuous reading via narrative progression with this established, vulnerable character. In the chapter’s final twist, we see Crusoe anew: Stein argues it is only the way Crusoe mutates—in high volume sales, in serials, and in remediations—that makes it seem as if Crusoe belongs to the genre...