British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, 1740-1830

In the five decades following Ian Watt's influential The Rise of the Novel, many scholars have successfully complicated his canon-forming account of the novel's development. With the advancement of feminist theory, new historicism, and postcolonial theory, critics have uncovered multiple trajectories of cultural and political power in the growth of novel writing and reading. Studies such as Ian Duncan's Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel, moreover, have effectively highlighted the centrality, as well as the ambivalence, of romance's role in the novel's ascension to cultural supremacy. Learned and challenging, Miranda Burgess' British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, 1740-1830 importantly contributes to our understanding of the cultural and political contexts that both shaped and reflected the generic development of romance in the second half of the long eighteenth century.

Burgess' dissent from traditional "rise of the novel" narratives begins with her contention that the British novel does not reach "institutional stability" (in the words of Michael McKeon, one of Watt's most distinguished revisers) by overcoming and supplanting the earlier form of prose fiction known generically as "romance" (5). Instead, Burgess argues for a generically fluid understanding of romance that recognizes its continuing influence on the form and content of the novel. This expansion of the genre is both exciting and confusing, as Burgess' wide definition of romance occasionally threatens to lose specificity. This risk is necessary, however, to support Burgess' project of "discussing the relations of romance not just to nationalist discourse but to the more general theorizing of social order that preoccupied eighteenth-century political economy" (6). For Burgess, romance is best seen as a capacious genre able to bring together multiple cultural, political, and literary concerns in new and challenging ways. Eschewing narratives of generic development that consider romance as either inherently conservative or naturally progressive, Burgess prefers to examine the ways in which a variety of authors mobilize the resources of romance to articulate multiple political positions over the long eighteenth century. If her book falls short of explaining how such fiction helps create a specifically "British" identity, it nonetheless does much to illuminate how prose romance, from Richardson to Scott, is integrally concerned with promoting specific visions of how British society ought to be composed and ordered.

In her introduction, Burgess explores how the discourse of political economy that arose in the long eighteenth century depended on unequal power relations naturalized in the domestic sphere and extended to civil society. Whereas Locke's theories of civil government were based on divine first causes, the ideological work of his successors-primarily Hume, Smith and Burke-instituted a "genealogy of authority" that relied more on the second causes of human nature and its apparent corollaries, custom and tradition. The resulting political economic explanations of socioeconomic phenomena effectively "privatize the arena of economic relations" and "naturalize the public sphere they increasingly modeled on economic order" (20). This combination of privatization and naturalization is already apparent in Pamela, which Burgess reads as Richardson's fictional defense of Lockean first causes, designed to counter proto-feminist Tory criticisms of liberal political economy put forward by earlier writers like Behn and Heywood. Clarissa, by dialectical contrast, turns to a sentimental Humean account of political economy to attempt to resolve Britain's post-Jacobite uncertainties about monarchical legitimacy. Given the enormity of the tasks involved, it is not surprising that Burgess finds Richardson's romances frequently exacerbating the ideological contradictions they attempt to resolve.

After Hume, the central term linking romance to political economy was "sentiment," which for Richardson formed the gold standard of domestic and, by extension, national order. In her second chapter, Burgess draws on contemporary debates over the Marriage Act and perpetual copyright to consider Sheridan's and Burney's fictional interrogations of the marriage market, especially with regard to issues of sentiment and credit. Wollstonecraft then becomes the pivotal figure in Burgess' account of romance's evolution; her works of fiction, including the oft-forgotten Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, are shown to represent the culmination of the radical critique of conservative "New Whig" political economy. Burgess' use of Frederic Jameson's concept of postmodern pastiche to describe the overall effect of Wollstonecraft's work is thought provoking, but seems under-historicized. The same can be said of the epilogue, which dashes the reader through several rapidly theorized case studies of Victorian fiction and late twentieth century fetishism. Burgess' purpose here is to assert the long-term effects of romance sensibility on the market economy, but the attempt is superfluous because the rest of the book does this very well on more fully conceptualized and historicized grounds.

British Fiction and the Production of Social Order is perhaps most engaging in its closing full-length chapters, where Burgess explores how romance becomes a newly respectable genre of social legitimacy in the hands of Radcliffe, Austen, and Scott. Radcliffe's gothic novels are shown to inculcate the conservative ideal of tasteful aesthetic appreciation as the key to a naturalized aesthetic order that will ensure Burkean social hierarchies. With nuanced readings of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, Burgess demonstrates how Austen substitutes a "practical aesthetics" (172) designed to convince readers that social order can be produced by romance-reading in the domestic space. Building on prior interpretations of how Scott accrues canonical and popular authority to himself, the author then convincingly demonstrates how Scott's early fiction strives to complete Austen's project of shifting the grounds of social legitimacy from the public to the private realms. Scott's ambivalent portrayals of the females who inhabit such domestic spheres, however, ensure he ultimately abandons gendered ideals of domestic harmony in favor of attempts to fashion cultural legitimacy through a celebration of the creative and commercial powers of the artist.

By drawing attention to the ways in which traditional accounts of "the rise of the novel" tend to overlook the topical political "conversations" that the novel continuously performs with other genres throughout the long eighteenth century, Burgess forces us to rethink our assumptions about the relations between the novel, the romance, and political economy. As such, British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, 1740-1830, should prove valuable for a wide range of scholars and critics.