• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

i SELECTIVE MEMORY: VICTORIAN PERIODICAL RECEPTIONS OF EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY AND ROMANTIC NOVELS A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY by Andrea L. Cabus May 2010 Dissertation Committee Members: Dr. Steven Newman, English Dr. Sally Mitchell, English Dr. Peter Logan, English Dr. Rachel S. Buurma, English, Swarthmore College ii ABSTRACT Title: Selective Memory: Victorian Periodical Receptions of Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Novels Candidate's Name: Andrea L. Cabus Degree: Doctor of Philosophy Temple University, 2010 Doctoral Advisory Committee Chair: Dr. Steven Newman Attention to Victorian reviews of eighteenth-century and Romantic novels reveals sympathy’s importance to the survival of classic novels and its role as a catalyst for critical standards that remain central. I demonstrate that reviewers used sympathy to describe a widespread but untheorized system of useful reading. Reviewers argue that rational sympathy could make reading a process of moral education. That is, if readers reject emotional stimulation, then reading about characters’ motives teaches readers to evaluate the people and situations they encounter in the real world. By looking at already canonical novelists like Richardson, Fielding and Scott, by denying canonicity to gothic novelists, and by creating new classics with figures like Austen, Victorian reviewers engage sympathy to teach their readers how to read reviews and novels appropriately. In doing so, reviewers also alter the reviewing voice, making it more sympathetic as well as using it to cajole and convince readers (rather than expecting agreement based on the reviewer’s expertise). Additionally, reviewers use persuasive techniques to build imagined relationships between readers, encouraging readers to take the moral ideals garnered from their reading and put them to use in relationships. I claim, then, that Victorian reviews, aimed at leisure readers, explore artistic questions primarily as contributors to sympathy and focus on how to read for moral and emotional education. As a result, crucial definitions and tenets about novel writing and reading are buried in iii paragraphs on morality or biography. If scholars understand why and how Victorian reviewers criticize novels, they will also recognize the complex arguments in these oft- derided articles. The result will be a fuller understanding of the history of novel criticism and a clearer picture of the values that guided the canonizing process during the Victorian period. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT....................................................................................................................ii CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................................1 2. ORDER FROM CONFUSION: VICTORIAN RECEPTIONS OF RICHARDSON AND FIELDING AND THE CHANGING VOICE OF LITERARY REVIEWING ................................................................................................... 44 3. “WELL-NIGH UNREADABLE”: THE GOTHIC NOVEL, THE PROBLEM OF SYMPATHY, AND THE BENEFITS OF DISTANCE .....................................89 4. AUSTEN-LIKE: VICTORIAN PERIODICAL REVIEWS AND THE FORMATION OF COMMUNITIES OF WOMEN ......................................... 132 5. RETHINKING ACTION IN SCOTT: VICTORIAN REVIEWS AND THE PROBLEM OF SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY.................................................. 178 BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................................................................................................... 224 1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Victorian reviews, aimed at leisure readers, approach novels via very different techniques than those used by recent scholars. These differences become particularly clear when we consider Victorian reviews of “classic” novels—a term that reviewers began using in this period to distinguish those novels of the past whose quality, characters and themes continued to resonate with readers of later periods.1 Reviews of these classics and their creators are interesting today because they reveal the ways authority is created and circulated in reviews and because they allow us to distinguish reviewers’ motives. Both factors explain why reviewers made choices that have since caused these articles to be dismissed as naïve and unprofessional. These reviews also show that, while they shared distinct interests, Victorian receptions of classic novels and novelists were complex and varied. Where stereotypes of a novel or novelist exist, those stereotypes are deployed to different ends by reviewers in different periodicals, even as literary reviewers across the board redefine the uses of authority, the reviewing voice and techniques for reading in strikingly similar ways. Victorian reviews operate very differently than the academic criticism that began to emerge by the end of the nineteenth century, but they do so purposefully. These articles explore artistic questions as contributors to sympathy, rather than in their own 1 Devoney Looser shows Anna Letitia Barbauld using this word confidently in her work as a reviewer and editor as early as the 1810s (Women and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750-1850, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.). Certainly, by the 1840s reviewers show no concern that readers may mistake this “classic” for the more traditional study of Greek and Roman classics. 2 right, because reviewers identify sympathy as the key to fiction’s potential to educate readers. The articles focus on reading for moral and emotional education not because these reviewers can’t see other ways to understand fiction—the articles on Scott considered in my final chapter demonstrate that this is not the case—but because reviewers assume that readers need guidance on cultural, moral and social issues. As a result, crucial definitions and critical tenets are buried in paragraphs on morality or biography. If scholars understand why and how Victorian reviewers criticize novels they will also recognize the complex arguments in these oft-derided articles. I argue that examining the motivations and assumptions of Victorian pre-professional criticism can help us understand the causes of the widening gulf between academic and leisure reading today. To gain authority for their systems of reading and writing in a period before literary criticism had been recognized as a profession, reviewers borrowed the authority of the classic authors they critiqued—or occasionally took authority by showing why popular authors of the past had no right to classic status. Thus reviewers used classic novels to gain a position of authority within the Victorian literary world, but also maintained that authority by keeping certain novels and novelists before the public eye. Authority here is circular, it exists without any real foundation—reviewers gain it from their supposedly authoritative subjects and but also claim to give authority to those subjects. In carrying out this exchange, though, reviewers were forced to confront the problem of distance created by classic novels: how could reviewers demonstrate the continued importance of these novels in the face of changing standards for literature, morals, and society—battles in which many reviewers played a part? 3 This problem developed with the growing reading audience. When the audience for Tom Jones or Clarissa as classics was comprised largely of educated male readers, critics did not need to worry about the status of the novels or the safety of the readers in a society whose moral standards were much different than those of Richardson and Fielding’s original audiences. As the audience for classic literature became more diverse, though, reviewers increasingly desired to control reception. They had to first make these classics seem alien—to create the need for an authoritative guide to the works—and then make them appropriately accessible to new readers. So, “classic” implies both a work that is believed to have important resonances with Victorian values and tastes and one unfamiliar enough to require expert intercession. For many reviewers between 1840 and 1880, then, the answer to the problem of distance was to invoke sympathy as a central trait of both good reading and good writing. Sympathy is itself a complex term. Eighteenth and nineteenth-century uses of “sympathy” differ significantly from more recent definitions. Today we use this term narrowly, to mean understanding for, or pity of, the person with whom we sympathize. Earlier uses of sympathy have been much more inclusive, encompassing both the current definition as well as the concepts now labeled “empathy” and “identification”. These two elements of sympathy are particularly important to the kinds of perceptive sympathetic reading that many Victorian reviewers champion. To feel for is not enough; readers are encouraged to feel with characters (and often novelists, reviewers and other readers) as part of a process by which readers can deduce moral values from their reading and become better interpreters of and actors in their society. 4 By reconsidering the Victorian reception of eighteenth-century and Romantic novelists in terms of sympathetic reading, I will give readers a sense not of what a single novel or novelist meant to all Victorians but rather of how that novelist’s career was presented and reshaped for the purposes of Victorian debates about topics as diverse as realism, moral education, reader response, and political and social action.

Load more

  236

Copy Link