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From: Linda Endersby <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Monday, December 3, 2007 10:42 pm
Subject: H-SHGAPE Book Review: Stokes on Claybaugh, _The Novel of Purpose_
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> H-NET BOOK REVIEW
> Published by [log in to unmask] (December 2007)
>
> Amanda Claybaugh. _The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social
> Reform in
> the Anglo-American World_. Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
> 2007. 264
> pages. Notes, bibliography, index. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-8014-
> 4480-2.
>
> Reviewed for H-SHGAPE by Claudia Stokes, Department of English,
> TrinityUniversity
>
> Realists and Reformers in the Nineteenth Century
>
>
> Amid the violence and tensions of contemporary globalization, it is
> perhaps unsurprising that American literary historians of the
> last decade
> have been preoccupied by literary transnationalism. As with the
> work of
> such critics as Anna Brickhouse, Wai Chee Dimock, and Kirsten
> Silva Gruesz
> (among many others), this field of research has carefully
> exposed the
> international contexts of American literature and put pressure
> on the
> nationalist borders that have always delimited literary history.
> AmandaClaybaugh's new book, _The Novel of Purpose_, is a worthy
> contribution to
> this growing field of transnational literary history.[1]
>
> In a work of impressive range and depth, Claybaugh focuses on the
> exchanges and reciprocal influences of American and English
> novelists of
> the nineteenth century. Several concentric arguments thread through
> Claybaugh's book, but the most foundational is the contention that
> English-language print culture in the nineteenth century was
> above all
> transnational, bound together by transatlantic reprinting,
> circulation,and mutual influence. And of all these connective
> links, social reform,
> Claybaugh argues, was particularly potent in binding together
> the two
> nations and their literatures, functioning as a "central conduit
> for these
> exchanges" (p. 27). As writers on both sides of the Atlantic crafted
> narratives documenting social ills, they not only consolidated this
> transatlantic interconnection but also produced a literary
> genre, "the
> novel of purpose" (p. 34), which would flourish through the end
> of the
> century. With ample textual evidence and useful case studies,
> Claybaughshows how readers and reviewers came to expect
> purposefulness from novels
> and how writers, as varied as Charles Dickens and Mark Twain,
> consequentlycomplied by adopting the forms of the novel of
> purpose--even if they were
> sometimes unsympathetic to the reformist campaigns they
> depicted. And it
> is in pursuit of this inquiry that Claybaugh makes her most
> compelling and
> important argument: that the nineteenth-century novel was
> composed and
> read "according to expectations learned from social reform" (p.
> 7). That
> is, they were expected to adopt a moral position and use
> narrative to
> effect social change.
>
> Claybaugh's book proceeds chronologically, beginning with a
> discussion of
> Harriet Martineau's 1830s reformist tours of the United States
> and closing
> with Twain's denunciation of Belgian imperial aggression in the early
> twentieth century. The book's first two chapters function as an
> extendedintroduction and carefully plot out the foundational
> terms of her
> argument: the interconnectedness of literary Anglo-America and the
> relation of reformist fiction to realist fiction. Five chapters on
> individual writers' engagements in purposeful fiction follow,
> and they
> impressively span from Dickens to Twain and Thomas Hardy, with
> studies of
> Anne Brontë, George Eliot, Henry James, and Elizabeth Stoddard
> along the
> way. Many of Claybaugh's case studies are unexpected and fresh. Rather
> than examining such true believers as William Dean Howells, one
> of the
> chief American exponents of purposeful fiction, Claybaugh
> instead analyzes
> ambivalent and even suspicious writers who complied with or
> resisted these
> generic expectations. In so doing, she shows how pervasive and even
> mandatory such concessions were in a literary climate still
> suspicious of
> novels. In addition, Claybaugh provides illuminating and original
> interpretations of such reluctant reformist novels as Stoddard's
> _Morgesons_ (1862) and Twain's _Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_
> (1885),tracing how these writers adapted stock reform narratives
> and characters
> to their own political and novelistic ends.
>
> The book is organized by a demonstrable interest in exploring
> the dynamics
> of literary pairings and couples. This manifests itself in the book's
> inquiry not only into the literary relations of England and the United
> States but also into the connections between individual pairs of
> writerswho, though separated by the Atlantic, read and reviewed
> each others'
> works, as with the chapters devoted to the relationships between
> Brontëand Stoddard and between Eliot and James. Even chapters
> devoted to single
> authors evince this thematic of pairs; for example, in her
> chapter on
> Dickens, Claybaugh characterizes his disastrous 1842 tour of the
> UnitedStates as a turning point in his attitudes toward
> reformist fiction, and
> this pivot enables her to juxtapose his writings before and
> after his
> disillusionment with American life and manners. Typically, however,
> Claybaugh begins her chapters by introducing the relationships
> that link
> these pairs, examines them individually, and then recouples them
> thematically at the end of the chapters. Claybaugh nimbly
> manages what
> might be a strained arrangement in someone else's hands, and
> these pairs
> enable her to explore particular features of purposeful novels,
> such as
> their handling of the marriage plot or the expectation of exemplary
> characters.
>
> _The Novel of Purpose_ is densely packed with finely honed
> arguments and
> observations, but a few points merit mention. First, Claybaugh's
> discussion of realism is a refreshing and important contribution
> to a
> well-worked-over field. With admirable poise, she offers a
> precise and
> clear definition of realism, distinguishes Anglo-American from
> continentalrealism, and charts the complicated history of
> realist criticism over the
> last several decades. She differentiates her own work from the 1980s
> practice of analyzing the politics of realist writers, such as
> Howells,James, and Wharton, only to pronounce them unacceptable;
> instead,Claybaugh steps away from this transhistorical critical
> practice to
> provide useful, historically rooted analyses of nineteenth-
> century writers
> within their own political contexts and within their own terms.
> Second,temperance narratives have received a revival of
> attention in recent
> years, and Claybaugh's contribution to the field is rich and
> fascinating.She dubs temperance reform "the storytelling reform"
> (p. 59) because of
> its reliance on narratives tracing ruinous poverty to alcohol
> consumption.She detects two pervasive narratives in temperance
> literature, and she
> shows how they came to be widely used by writers who adapted
> them to their
> own interests in marriage reform, as was the case with Stoddard and
> Brontë.
>
> Claybaugh's chapter on Hardy is perhaps the least successful. It
> seeks to
> show how he, like Dickens, disavowed reformist fiction only to
> embrace its
> successes retroactively, but the argument is not well served by the
> chapter's organization, which is broken up into discrete
> sections on such
> topics as the New Woman and loses the argument's thread. The
> chapter, too,
> lacks the transatlantic dimension of the book's other chapters,
> though her
> reading of _Jude the Obscure_ (1895) is no less significant.
>
> These matters aside, _The Novel of Purpose_ is well written,
> impressivelyresearched, and wide ranging. Claybaugh offers an
> important and long
> overdue analysis of this novelistic genre, and her book deserves
> to rank
> among the finest recent contributions to transnational literary
> history.
> Note
>
> [1]. See Anna Brickhouse, _Transamerican Literary Relations and the
> Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere_. Cambridge: Cambridge
> University Press,
> 2004; Wai Chee Dimock, _Through Other Continents: American
> LiteratureAcross Deep Time_. Princeton: Princeton
> University Press, 2006; and
> Kirsten Silva Gruesz, _Ambassadors of Culture: The
> Transamerican Origins
> of Latino Writing_. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.
>
>
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