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<i>The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution</i> (review)

2005; University of Toronto Press; Volume: 17; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ecf.2005.0026

1911-0243

Lisa Wood,

Religion, Gender, and Enlightenment

286 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION17:2 M.O. Grenby. TheAnti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and theFrench Revolution. Cambridge Studies in Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2001. 271pp. US65;UK42.50. ISBN 0-52180351 -9. TheAnti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and theFrench Revolution represents a significant contribution to scholarship in the fiction of the late eighteenth century, primarily for die sustained attention it gives to a relatively underexamined group ofnovels. M.O. Grenby's bookcontributes to a range ofpublications that engage with antijacobin fiction, including Eve Tavor Bannet's TheDomestic Revolution, Gary Kelly's English Fiction ofthe RomanticPeriod, April London's work onJane West and antijacobin satire, Anne K Mellor's Mothers of the Nation, Eleanor Ty's Empowering the Feminine, and Nicola Watson's Revolution and theForm oftheBritish Novel (as well as my own Modes ofDiscipline). Unlike these other works, Grenby's monograph focuses exclusively on antiJacobin texts, by both male and female novelists. In so doing, TheAnti-Jacobin Novel helps to reshape our understanding of this important form ofpolitical literature and its relationship to the culture that produced it. Through meticulous archival research, Grenby has uncovered more than fifty novels that can be classified as anti-Jacobin in their overt challenges to revolutionary politics and theory. He reads this group ofnovels as a body, positioning them in relation to one another and to their political and historical context, in order to support two main arguments: first, that antijacobin novels constitute a distinctgenre ofBritish fiction, and, second, that reading the texts in this wayworks to "clarify the nature ofconservatism as a whole in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries" (10). Grenby structures his argument around a set of antijacobin strategies in fiction, exploring the ways in which specific rhetorical and narrative techniques enable a novelistic critique of the principles and texts of BritishJacobinism. Chapters 1 and 2 lay the groundwork for subsequent explorations of antiJacobin fictional techniques by examining the appropriation and recuperation ofthe novel as a didactic form and the variedways in which revolution is represented in antijacobin texts. Most compellingly, Grenby identifies a strategic challenge faced by antijacobin novelists: how to counterJacobinism without simultaneouslyvalorizing it through critical attention. For this reason, Grenby argues, the Jacobinism represented in anti-Jacobin novels is an empty construction, vague and generalized, depending on stereotypical tropes and characters, and bearing little direct relation to contemporaryBritish radicalism. Chapter 3 explores various ways diat "new philosophers" are represented in antijacobin novels (often as either villainous or misled), and distinguishes these from the more abstract "new philosophy." Chapter 4 identifies a key character in the antijacobin novel, the philosopher-villain, which Grenby categorizes as a "vaurien," taken from the title ofIsaac D'Israeli's novel ofthe REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS287 same name (the French "vaurien" translates roughly as "good-for-nothing"). Chapter 5 engages with a central concern ofRomantic-era conservatives: social hierarchy, orwhat the antiJacobins referred to as the "established order," and the challenges presented to it notonly byJacobin "levellers" but also bycorrupt aristocrats and the ambitious middle ranks. These chapters usefully examine howplotting andpolitics are intertwined, so thatparticularplot trajectories and character traits become encoded political commentaries. Grenby's final chapter explores the process whereby the antijacobin novel became the dominant fictional form at the beginning of the nineteenth century, by identifying a "complicity between authors and the nexus ofinfluences exerting an effect on their writing" (182). The chapter provides a constructive model for understanding the relationships among writers, publishers , booksellers, reviewers, and consumers that enabled the development of a conservative orthodoxy in prose fiction. This strategy allows Grenby to avoid the thorny issue ofaudiorial intent, and instead to provide a historically grounded examination of the reciprocal relationship between politics and fiction. Similar theorization could usefully have been developed around the concepts of propaganda and ideology. These terms are used transparently throughout the text, and statements such as "Antijacobinism, insofar as it can be ascribed a coherent identity at all, was more propaganda dian ideology" (65) demand elaboration. It is unclear here what versions ofideology and propaganda allow this distinction. While one of the great strengths of Grenby's work is its reading of antiJacobin novels as a group in order to identify common strategies...