Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Hammerschmidt, Sören

Titel

The Sentimental Novel in the Eighteenth Century ed. by Albert J. Rivero (review)

Ist Teil von

• Eighteenth - Century Studies, 2020-07, Vol.53 (4), p.740-742

Ort / Verlag

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Literature Online (LION)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• In a best-case scenario such as Joseph Bartolomeo's chapter on "The Sentimental Novel in America"—which could easily and maybe usefully have been distributed across two or three chapters given the range and variety of material it tries to cover—the thematic strands of several other chapters (notably those by Barbara Benedict, Bonnie Latimer, Brycchan Carey, and Maureen Harkin) are knitted into the discussion at hand in such a way that Bartolomeo's contribution becomes a crossroads, test case, and distillation of the collection's metanarratives about sentimental novels and the current state of their study. Yet earlier in the collection, Gillian Dow proposes—with explicit reference to Sodeman's chapter—that "the popularity of the sentimental fiction of Sophia Lee and Burney's last novel … is far less anachronistic if the popularity of [sentimental-novelist writers and translators like Revolutionary émigrée Sophie] Cottin in Britain is also taken into account" when conducting surveys of the first two decades of the nineteenth century (98).1 The preservation of "differences of opinion or critical methodology" is undoubtedly a valuable endeavor in collections such as these, yet I cannot help but think that some acknowledgement, if not an actual incorporation of Dow's convincing argument, could have gone great lengths towards supporting and strengthening Sodeman's adherence to the argument in favor of anachronism and above all of understanding late sentimental novels as "a genre that, through its ideological contradictions and capacity for untoward feeling, made formally meaningful the paradoxes of female self-assertion" at a time when emergent novel genres failed or refused to do so (192). On Rivero's reading, moreover, "some gothic novels get right the nightmare of women living in a society which, while ostensibly valuing them, denied them full civic participation by marriage, property and voting laws that ensured that they would remain in an inferior position" and dependent on men (211) in much the way that Sodeman argues Lee's and Burney's late novels do as well.