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Essay
of the Month: March 2001
Leonard
Tennenhouse
"Libertine America"
from differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies
(Volume 11, Number 3)
During the
last two decades or so of the eighteenth century, Americans consumed
an astounding number of seduction stories. With the establishment
of the new republic, readers not only continued to read Pamela
and Clarissa, just as they had in the years leading
up to the Revolution, they also bought out American printings
that conveniently distilled such sentimental novels down to their
core seduction plots. These same readers were drawn to such homegrown
seduction narratives as The Power of Sympathy, Amelia, and
The Coquette as much as they were to Charlotte Temple, a British
transplant which garnered only tepid praise when first published
in England and quickly became a best seller once reprinted in
the United States. Such was the American demand for seduction
narratives that even the distinguished monthlies of the period
printed serial installments of novels and innumerable short stories
all dealing with seduction. One cannot overstate the redundancy
of these narratives. Whether British or American in origin, this
fiction invariably featured the same array of cruel libertines,
foolish coquettes, ruined women, stillborn babies, and destinies
misshapen by desire. Judging by the sheer number of variations
on this stock of plots and characters, there was virtually no
end to the demand for this type of fiction. . . .
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Essay
of the Month: February 2001
April Alliston
"Introduction," The Recess
The University Press of Kentucky
The Recess
enjoyed enormous popularity for well over twenty years after its
first publication in 1783, not only in the English-speaking world,
but all over Europe. Its success was important in establishing
both gothic and historical fiction, of which it is one of the
earliest examples, as modes that were pre-dominant in England
for decades afterward and remain popular to this day. Sophia Lee
sets her "tale of other times" in the reign of Elizabeth I, and
weaves its romance plot around the tragic history of Mary, Queen
of Scots. Its twin heroines and narrators are raised in a mysterious
subterranean chamber, linked to the outside world by secret passages.
One of the keys to Lee's success with her experiment in historical
Gothic fiction was her skill in using the form of the novel to
elicit strong emotional responses in her readers, a skill she
developed in part through her lifelong association with the theater.
. . .
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of The
University Press of Kentucky.
Essay
of the Month: November 2000
Margaret Cohen
The Sentimental Education of the Novel
Princeton UP
19th-century
French realism was one of the most influential novelistic poetics
ever invented and critics have long ascribed its genesis to the
social upheavals of the French Revolution. In The Sentimental
Education of the Novel, I ask what this invention would look
like if we returned realism to the novelistic contexts of its
time. Excavating the dominant practices of the novel when Balzac
and Stendhal began their careers, I reveal a sentimental form
pioneered by women writers, which literary history has subsequently
neglected, despite its one-time popularity and prestige. A powerful
poetics of emerging liberal-democratic society, sentimentality
offered aesthetic solutions to Revolutionary trauma, and I show
how Balzac and Stendhal staged a hostile takeover of its solutions,
even as they equated sentimentality with over-rated women writers
and silly women readers. This slippage between gender and poetics
helps explain why women did not play a prominent role in founding
the French realist lineage, an absence all the more striking in
light of women's decisive contribution to realism across the Channel.
For CSN, I
have chosen selections on why recovering forgotten literature
is crucial to renewing the project of literary history; and why
such recovery should be organized according to the paradigm of
genre. I have also included selections from my own generic archaeology
of post-Revolutionary sentimentality, which I exemplify using
Sophie Cottin's celebrated Claire d'Albe (1799).
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Copyright
1999 by Margaret Cohen. Reproduced by permission of Princeton
UP.
Essay
of the Month: October 2000
Robert Darnton
The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France
W.W. Norton and Co., Inc.
"The literary
marketplace of eighteenth-century France," writes Robert Darnton
in the pages you are about to read, "overflowed with best-sellers
that have been almost completely forgotten." These forgotten and
forbidden books are an excellent starting point for Atlantis,
placed as they are halfway between what the market is trying to
read (as shown by booksellers' and publishers' lists), and what
the state is trying to repress (registers of confiscations and
police raids). A compelling juxtaposition of conflicting historical
forces, which Darnton brings back to life with a striking mix
of conceptual elegance and scholarly thoroughness.
Having established
his list of best-sellers, Darnton proceeds to interpret: in most
cases, by setting the individual book within the context of a
wider genre (the livres philosophiques, for instance, or
the chroniques scandaleuses). In the case of non-canonical
literature, this interaction of text and genre acquires a peculiar
intensity, which we will encounter again next month in Margaret
Cohen's Sentimental Education of the Novel. Not that genre
is an unproblematic category in the study of the archive: in front
of Table 2.7 for instance – the "General Pattern of Demand"
– the critic discovers with a gasp of surprise that, though
several forbidden best-sellers are novels, the term "novel" is
nowhere to be seen. In part, this is another peculiarity of the
archive, where borderline cases abound, and the novel has not
yet fully separated itself from other cultural forms. But it is
probably also a sign that between the "thematic" approach often
adopted by book historians, and the "formal" approach of many
literary historians, there is a significant difference. An irreconcilable
difference? We will see. But what a productive argument this could
be.
Years ago,
Robert Darnton's discovery of the archive of the Société
typographique de Neuchâtel irreversibly changed what we know
of the reading habits of the past. Literary history, however,
has not yet really acknowledged the new evidence, let alone used
it to rethink its foundations. Let us begin.
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