Common Knowledge

Common Knowledge 9.3 (2003) 549

Miranda J. Burgess, British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, 1740-1830(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 324 pp.

Burgess's is the forty-third volume to be published over eight years in the series Cambridge Studies in Romanticism—a series that (as its editors declare on the frontispiece) "aims to foster the best new work" on the fifty-year period from the 1780s to the 1830s, when "those notions of 'literature' and of literary history, especially national literary history, on which modern scholarship in English has been founded" first developed. While the goal of recovering the Romantic origins of late-twentieth-century scholarship is altogether worthy, Burgess's contribution raises the question of how much scholarly mining such a relatively narrow field of specialized study can sustain. For despite its obvious intelligence and virtues, this volume bears a marked sense of having combed for its evidence through already well-sifted materials. Burgess finds nuggets nonetheless. Her chapter on Walter Scott and his turn from writing historical romances intended to advance his politics to writing romances that became themselves (like the Icelandic sagas) the basis for nationalist feeling and unity is compelling. So is her overall argument: that the genre of romance played a crucial role in the construction of British national identity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, especially by "naturalizing" its existing social, economic, and political arrangements. But romance, always a capacious term, begs for unpacking here. Is it "a genre that intervenes between political history and private narrative, social order and family?" Or, as the jacket cover declares, is it "a hybrid genre defined by its role in the negotiation of conflicts between political economy and moral philosophy?" And what is the difference? Like other large concepts in Burgess's text (political economy, legitimacy, conservatism), romance—despite her carefully crafted prose, rich in thought and reference—rarely emerges from shadowy abstraction to illuminate her particular points.

 

Eileen Gillooly

Eileen Gillooly, director of the core curriculum at Columbia University, is the author of Smile of Discontent: Humor, Gender, and Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, which received the Perkins Prize from the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature, and she is currently completing Anxious Affection: Parental Feeling in Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture.