"New texts in receptive minds": the cross-pollination of genres in the long eighteenth-century.(Lyric Generations: Poetry and the Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century)(Book review)

Publication: Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies

Publication Date: 22-MAR-06

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COPYRIGHT 2006 Indiana University Press

G. GABRIELLE STARR. Lyric Generations: Poetry and the Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.298 pp.

" Books ... are made to a significant extent out of other books.... Texts fermenting with other texts do indeed give rise to new texts in receptive minds" (202). So Jocelyn Harris reminded readers at the end of "Richardson: Original or Learned Genius?" In Lyric Generations, G. Gabrielle Starr extends this argument to include not only canonical novelists such as Samuel Richardson or Henry Fielding, but also Eliza Haywood, Thomas Percy, and other eighteenth-century readers of the novel and lyric poetry. This argument, on the surface, is no more than common sense. After all, without previous books or texts, there would be no literature, literary studies, or literary field, and writers would start from a blank slate. Scholars such as J. Paul Hunter, Lennard Davis, Robert Mayer, and Michael McKeon have examined the extent to which non-fictional texts (news, autobiographies, conduct manuals, even history), print, and epistemology have shaped the novel as a genre. Ros Ballester, Catherine Gallagher, and others have explored the genre's indebtedness to amatory fiction while William Warner has depicted the emerging novel as "early modern print entertainment" (xiii). Furthermore, as Nancy Armstrong's Desire and Domestic Fiction has convincingly indicated, novels do not merely infect "weaker," more susceptible readers with what Mikhail Bakhtin calls "Bovaryism" (852), or the attempt to emulate fictional characters; they affect the culture as a whole through the act of defining desire, sexuality, femininity, and masculinity. If writing has the power to "[situate] the individual...

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