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Warner’s book opens with a chapter-long survey of critical understandings of the eighteenth-century British novel—from John Dunlop’s (1841) to Taine’s to Watt’s—which are all dismissed as the distorting constructions of intellectuals seeking to elevate this fiction into literary respectability. A true broader understanding of the period’s novels, Warner argues, must recognize their status as entertaining narratives that gave rise to modern media culture. While aware that “it is impossible to define the novel in any definitive way” because of its “long history in European writing, its sheer plurality, and the amorphous ductility peculiar to novels” (p. 47), Warner proposes that it is a form used “to divert or amuse” where “in the decisive but enigmatic exchange between the entertainment and the entertained, desire is engaged” (p. 45). Further, it is for him an early manifestation of media culture, defined as “the practices of production and consumption associated with print media . . . [whose] only consistent ideology is that of pleasure itself” (p. 93).

By entertainment Warner actually means “adult” entertainment. And by media culture he means a wide readership addicted to such, denials or vociferous condemnations of the habit notwithstanding. Indeed, his book focuses on early British erotic fiction which incorporates censorious discourse that in context functions defensively to interrupt and excuse the reader’s pornographic self-indulgence.

Chapters 2 through 5 discuss works by Aphra Behn (Love Letters), Delariviere Manley (New Atalantis), and Eliza Haywood (Love in Excess), and what Warner claims is a moralistically primed parody of their novels in Defoe’s Roxana. These chapters comprise the best account to date of the formulaic aspects of such erotic fiction, typical ingredients of which include familiar heterosexual and lesbian sex scenes featuring retro-libertines (female and male); occasional [End Page 1130] kinky action (such as Briljard’s attempted rape upon Silvia’s breasts in Love Letters and the climax by strangulation symbolically conjured, in Roxana, when the Prince strangely clasps a diamond necklace around the Fortunate Mistress’ neck); seduction schemes; New Comedy plot complications of amorous intrigue; thrillingly emotive romantic verbiage; and the genre’s discourse condemning sexual license.

Although Warner notes that “pleasures disowned become discomforting and, through embarrassment, a kind of unpleasure” (p. 41), he stresses that this censorious discourse normally functions not only to defend but to enhance the erotic pleasures of readers. Hence the limited success, detailed in chapter 5, of Richardson’s effort to reform the novel along anti-pornographic lines in Pamela and the appeal of what critics have referred to as this work’s Puritan striptease (and even of certain “anti-pamela” works, like Pamela Censured, that fixate on the salacious materials of Richardson’s text). In a final, overclever chapter, Fielding is seen confronting the tradition of the erotic novel and rejecting its guilty pleasures in practice but not in theory: These pleasures are successfully evoked and disabled in Shamela but given theoretical sanction in Tom Jones through Fielding’s ironically paternalistic authorial mask embodying “the Law”—Warner’s term conflating Freud’s superego, Lacan’s Name-of-the-Father, and the Establishment of sixties’ countercultural protest.

This book treats subject matter that has been ignored in old and new canonizing studies of eighteenth-century British fiction. The exception, however, is Warner’s own earlier Reading “Clarissa” (1979), which offended certain feminists and ideologues of culturally conservative stripe by insisting on this masterwork’s erotic components, notably the prim Clarissa’s unacknowledged sexual interest in her rake and rapist, Lovelace. This larger study should again so provoke some readers. A “Conclusion” encoding a pro-pornographic stance celebrates Lovelacean “libertine interpretation” (p. 281), the “allure to readers of the novels of amorous intrigue, as well as the freedom of readers to read what they want” (p. 290), and their “restless and unruly quest for entertainment” (p. 294).

Richetti’s The English Novel in History: 1700–1780 is a thesis book that deserves to be read by all humanities scholars. Its argument is that eighteenth-century British novels engage in the intellectual discipline of conceiving of identity as sociologically defined. As Richetti states in an introductory chapter, these novels comprise “a unique set of documents” (p. 1) in which neither mindless entertainment nor improving messages, nor the “blending of excitement and morality” (p. 15), is the point, but rather “individuality itself is the issue” (p. 16). For, they “examine various sorts of intersections and infiltrations between self and its communal surroundings, mutually defining relationships that dramatize an interdependence or even an inseparability between self and society that tends or hopes to nullify the distinction between the two terms” (p. 12). Succeeding chapters (2 through 8) are arranged in roughly chronological order and alternate between discussions of novels by [End Page 1131] Behn, Manley, Haywood, Sheridan, and MacKenzie (among other formula fictionalists), and by the more original talents Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Burney, and Sterne.

Throughout, Richetti elaborates his thesis by inspecting novelistic moments usually appreciated for their psychological depth but which, beyond this, are shown to render “psychosocial” depth often achieved by social class analysis. When, for example, Defoe’s Moll Flanders sees her early seduction by the aristocratic Elder Brother as a missed opportunity for extracting, through sexual resistance, what would have been a legitimate marriage proposal (had she recognized the “supervising network of socioeconomic relationships”), the character depiction “extend[s] the psychological by giving it a social context and by endowing old Moll with a retrospective wisdom that encompasses social as well as personal knowledge” (p. 61). An even more arresting example of such psychosocial depth occurs in multiple character depiction tendered in Evelina, when Burney’s heroine, the inelegant cit Mr. Smith, and the mannered but aggressive Sir Clement Willoughby are at Vauxhall Gardens exchanging “socially and sexually informed glances.” Richetti explicates:

Evelina [now] resents Sir Clement . . . [who] finds her in such bourgeois company. . . . But she watches Mr. Smith watching Sir Clement, and her condescending sexual enemy becomes her class ally, since her conversations with this elegant aristocrat separate her from the likes of Mr. Smith. Evelina does not see (as readers can) that Mr. Smith’s embarrassment is a version of her own deep inferiority in similar encounters with her social superiors, that she is in her turn being watched (and watching herself) for tell-tale signs of social awkwardness by others above her in the social order.

(pp. 226–27)

Richetti also explores novelistic historical representations seen to construe subjectivity sociologically in valorized forms ranging from old-world communal identity to modern upwardly mobile individualism. He submits that recommendations of various modes of communal identity are proffered symbolically in plots of feminine innocence countermined by masculine demands of pleasure and power by Manley, Richardson, and sentimental novelists (esp. pp. 33–37, 94–95, and 276–77); and in unattractive representations of the new order of self-interested action and desire by the satiric Fielding and Smollett (esp. pp. 121–25, 166–67). Such recommendations are, he believes, on display too in moments of metanovelistic reflection tinged with an anti-aristocratic bias. When, for example, in Joseph Andrews Fielding’s Lady Booby agonizes over Joseph’s refusal of her sexual advances, she exhibits “intensities” that are a function of her “leisure-class luxury of introspective sexual fantasy” (p. 126), but which may also constitute Fielding’s freighted “embodiment of the class-specific self-indulgence licensed by amatory fiction” (p. 127). And one amatory novelist, Behn, may herself have been capable of such critical reflection, since in Love Letters her Philander wittily describes his failed conquest of Sylvia owing to premature ejaculation, [End Page 1132] “‘ye gods, just then, by an over-transport, to fall just fainting before the surrendering gates, unable to receive the yielding treasure!,’” which “in its comic urgency and self-depreciating inventiveness . . . points to Behn’s impatience with the repetitive self-indulgence built into the genre” (p. 25).

But the most remarkable sociohistorical subjectivities of early British fiction are, for Richetti, recommended communalistic modern personalities created by Defoe and Richardson. There is Robinson Crusoe’s late conversion “from an obsessive isolato,” into “a patron surrounded by clients,” who is “an organizing center of specifically social relationships involving dozens of other people in a communal enterprise” (p. 71). And there is the dying Clarissa’s transformation—through individualistic assertion that includes the provisions of her lengthy will—from a disintegrated self into a “soul who is mindful, even from beyond the grave, of the social network of recognitions and reciprocities in which she will continue to have her special sort of being” (p. 116). In both cases we are asked to witness depicted characters wrought from new-world individualism yet able to secure an apartness from it by virtue of their manipulative control over circumstances and events. In what is a rendition of the theme of necessity versus freedom, they as modern resourceful personalities come to fashion and inhabit more ideal (less modern) communalistic societies.

Richetti has now made it seem obvious that eighteenth-century British novels treat the problematic of identity compellingly—no less so than do disquisitions by philosophers and recent political intellectuals. And, linking this fiction’s imagined individuals to “that broadest of themes, social change and social representation” (p. 16), he has with characteristic sophistication reopened areas of inquiry pursued in his Philosophical Writing: Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, as well as in his work on early English novels accomplished in Popular fiction Before Richardson: Narrative Patterns 1700–1739, Defoe’s Narratives: Situations and Structures, and numerous critical essays to date. Students will find this newest book exhilarating, partly because it is a mature scholarly performance generously cast in the form of a classroom guide to the English novel in history.