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COPYRIGHT 2003 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
By Helene Moglen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. x + 216 pages.
The titular identification of the "English Novel" as the subject of this study is at once misleading and entirely appropriate. While the fictional texts Moglen analyzes are limited to the eighteenth century, her argument about their transhistorical focus on questions of loss and mourning effectively erases distinctions between the genre's inception and its subsequent development. Social, political, even cultural changes do not finally impinge on the work of the novel, defined here as the management of the "strains and contradictions" imposed by the displacement, late in the seventeenth century, of the preeminent category of rank by that of sex/gender. According to this formulation, an essentialized and naturalized system of sexual difference became definitive in the early modern period, as part of a process in which identity was gendered and conceptualized in mutually exclusive terms. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the increasing experience of social division as porous and hence amenable to change had as its correlative an apprehension of gender difference as absolute, so absolute as to be at times virtually unrecognizable by the contemporaries on whom it impinged. Only with twentieth-century psychoanalytic theory does the consequence of this difference--the formerly submerged "trauma of gender"--become the object of direct critical scrutiny.
Moglen's premise is thus not simply that sex and gender, rather than class and capital, define the novel; she wants also to argue that the novel is the crucial medium through which the psychological and social meanings of gender that constitute modern consciousness were both revealed and negotiated. The pairing of theoreticians with the subjects of her individual chapters--Heinz Kohut with Daniel Defoe, Jessica Benjamin with Samuel Richardson, Jacques Lacan with Laurence Sterne, Nicolas Abraham...
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