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When Novels Were Books
Jordan Alexander Stein
Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2020 Hardcover.
253 pages. ISBN
978-0674987043. $39.95 / £31.95 / €36
Reviewed by Guyonne
Leduc Université de Lille
Divided into four chapters, this erudite and challenging “synthesis” [18],
presented as a “work of revision” [6], offers a renewed perspective on “the
rise of the novel” (to borrow from the title of Ian Watt’s famous essay published
in 1957 and subtitled Studies in Defoe,
Richardson and Fielding). It “’refram[es] ‘the rise of the novel’” [19], as
is asserted by Stein, in the wake of the essays he mentions on material texts written
by book historians Lara Langer Cohen (The
Fabrication of American Literature : Fraudulence and Antebellum Print
Culture [2012]), Trish Loughran (The
Republic in Print : Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building,
1770-1870 [2007]) and Ben Kafka (The
Demon of Writing : Powers and Failures of Paperwork [2012]) who resort
to “archival and empirical evidence” [19] concerning transatlantic literature. Influenced
by Roger Chartier’s works [70], Stein is interested in books as “physical
object(s)” [3] characterized in particular by a size, and a binding. He stresses
that, in the seventeenth century and during more than a hundred years, a book
format “indicates something about the work’s genre” [2]; the “genre” of a book was not then defined as today
(theme, “plot, narration, point of view...”), but was linked to “material
practices” (“including editing, circulation and reprinting”) [4]. The title of the Introduction, “Form and Format” [1-20], encapsulates
Stein’s argument about the “relationship between format and genre” [3]: one
should stop considering the “features of format as largely irrelevant to our
understanding of genre” [5], here the novel. He defends the idea that “the
novel as a genre shares a mutually informing history with the development of
the book as a media platform” [7-8], or, in other words, that “the force of the
material history of the book […] bears on the generic history of the novel,
rather than the other way round” [12]. To prove his point, Stein advances three
theses concerning respectively, first, literary form with a focus on
“character, or the figural representation of persons” [8], second, reading (both
“continuous reading” – instead of discontinuous – and “reading for
identification” [9]), and, third, secularization – the pairing of “Protestant
writings” and novels by the 1790s had “more to do with changes in religious
publishing than in novel publishing” [9]. Those three theses are delved into in
successive chapters. The first one, “Paper Selves” [21-52], examines the confessional
narratives written by Reformed Protestants in New England (in the 1630s), then
in England (after 1649) where “speakers figure themselves negatively” [10], that
is as “vulnerable before God’s judgements” [10] as in Augustine’s fourth-century
Confessions (Books 6 and 8 in
particular) representing his own conversion. Hence, public confessional
narratives with negative self-representations circulated in manuscript books (to
be read “for application and [for] coherence” [77]) about a hundred years
before the rise of the Anglophone novel, which means that the figurations of
novelistic characters were indirectly influenced by pious ones (conversion
narratives, spiritual biographies, confession of penitent sinners). Therefore, both Chapter 2, “The Character of the Steady Sellers” [53-91],
and Chapter 4, “Printers, Libraries, and Lyrics” [125-164], “position novels […]
in relation to the books of piety” [12] as was often the case in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Steady sellers were “Protestant
devotional books” [10] to be read discontinuously (as the Bible); they were mainly
non-narrative, “not character-driven” [10], and they dramatized vulnerable
characters. Yet, by the later seventeenth century, they began to take a “narrative
shape” [10]. Stein chooses the examples of The
Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) and of Robinson
Crusoe (1719), narratives which are often considered as early novels [10], in
order to show the formal and material influence of steady sellers on them. Chapters 1 and 2 pave the way to the central one, “The Rise of the
Text-Network” [92-124], where Stein relies on Richardson’s fiction, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (printed in
1740 in London) and on the nonfictional missionary diaries of David Brained
(published in 1746 in Philadelphia and as The
Life of David Brainerd edited by Jonathan Edwards in 1749 in Boston) to
bring into relief similarities between the two (beyond to make an example, to
be guides), that is “negative means of figuring characters” together with
“materiel processes of dissemination” such as “abridgement, anthologization,
translation, reprinting, serialization, and illustration” [125] which always
influence the “experience of reading” [20]. Besides, “the ‘religious’ and the
‘literary’” markets for books were relatively unified during the mid-eighteenth
century, in London as well as in the North American colonies” [121]. Such material common points disappeared at the end of the eighteenth
century for causes accurately detailed in Chapter 4, “Printers, Libraries, and
Lyrics” [125-164]. Protestant narratives (autobiographies) and literary
writings such as novels gradually differentiated less for a matter of content and
success of the novel than for economic changes in the London print market as
“books of piety” [126] were increasingly printed thanks to religious
philanthropy [132], by voluntary religious associations [134] and/or thanks to
subscriptions lists [132], in partnership with single printers [135]. Those
books of piety and tracts circulated for free and were thus subtracted from “broader
commercial production and consumption patterns” [137]. Moreover, evolutions in
production and circulation led to changes not only in access but also in social
and moral value and authority [151-55]. In the “Conclusion: The Retroactive Rise of the Novel” [165-178], Stein
reasserts that his study is “revisionist” [166]. He quotes Eric Hobsbawm on
“Inventing Traditions” (1983) in the nineteenth century [172] to emphasize that
novel criticism invented a history of the novel [172] with “the rise of the
novel” as a retroactive critical position” [172]. His work belongs more to
media history, to book history (interested in “the physicality of books” [177]),
than to genre history, his argument being that the formal features of texts
(“what and how they figure” [166]) – here “secular entertainment and religious
instruction” [167) – are “mediated” (166] by material conditions, not the other
way round. This scholarly study, roughly following chronology to reconstruct the history
of “the rise of the novel,” closes on extremely rich Notes [181-233],
Acknowledgements [235-41], and an Index
nominum et rerum [243-253]. Yet, a “Selected bibliography” or, at least, a
list of “Works cited” is unfortunately missing. It could have been the
finishing touch for a very useful reading of this original and didactic (sometimes
a little repetitive) book which is thought-provoking as early as its epigraph
drawn (without a precise reference) from Roland Barthes: “Tout ceci doit être
considéré comme dit par un personnage de roman”.
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