Deidre Lynch and William B. Warner, eds. Cultural Institutions of the Novel. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.

Reviewed by Rachel Ramsey, West Virginia University.

The requisite English course in the rise of the novel most often involves the study of what the novel is not. Rather than focus their study along the outline dictated by such a task, already delineated by Ian Watt in 1957 and re-examined by critics such as Michael McKeon, the editors of this collection instead take the lead from work in cultural, feminist and gender studies to "redirect critical attention from refining the definition of the novel as a literary type to understanding how novels produce social divisions: from what a novel is to what novels do" (2). As Deidre Lynch and William Warner indicate in their Introduction, the sixteen essays in this collection investigate novels' "status as print commodities, their mediation of national cultures, and their role in transnational exchange" (3). The revisionist heuristic implicit in such an endeavor finds confirmation in the wide range of texts read and examined by the authors; unfamiliar and noncanonical novels (including Natsume Soseki's Kokoro, Witi Ihimaera's The Matriarch, and Edna Ferber's Showboat) are discussed as often as canonical texts, so the contributors continually challenge the assumptions informing the idea of "the novel."

Homer Brown's Prologue on the American Romance of the "rise of the novel" and Clifford Siskin's Epilogue on novels' role in "naturalizing writing" through the "rise of novelism" bookend the thirteen essays on specific novels and novelists, providing yet another framework in which to view and scrutinize assumptions about the role of the novel. Brown calls attention to the disciplinary positions of both writers and readers in this collection and their investment in the novel's role in transmitting narratives of origin as well as how the profession uses the novel to solidify visions of national identity. Siskin explores the proposition that novels mark the arrival and establishment of a modern social and psychic realism and attempts to uncover from the "histories of the novel" a "history of writing," analyzing the concurrent naturalization of novel writing and the "particular configuration of writing, print and silent reading" (424). The emphasis on seeing how the novel has functioned historically resonates particularly with Bridget Orr's essay on the works by lesser known contemporary Maori writers' and their connection to indigenous tradition and Deidre Lynch's essay that decenters Jane Austen's traditionally canonical position within the teleology of the "rise of the novel" to examine how Austen was used to script national narratives in interwar England.

Both Orr and Lynch, along with many of the contributors -- Warner, Katie Trumpener, and Dane Johnson among them -- question ingrained assumptions that privilege novels as the site of cross-cultural negotiation by examining how novels have functioned historically. Orr's essay examines how "Maori novels" challenge not only the dominant narrativization of New Zealand history but challenge the literary academy -- which is predominately Pakeha or European -- to reconfigure their largely New Critical or Leavisite interpretative practices. She attempts to move beyond the "Scylla of ethnographic reductionism" and "Charybdis of Eurocentric formalism" to suggest a mode of reading that draws on the cultural tradition of haka, or dance, which serves "to welcome and entertain guests, to establish reputation, to express hatred, to prepare for conflict, to mourn the dead, and to comment on current problems" (82, 83). Reading Maori novels within this framework, allows the reader and critic alike to investigate the status of "the novel" in Maori terms, revealing how contemporary Maori writers draw on indigenous traditions of "cultural production [to] suggest that novels might be understood as communal positions -- treasured objects, displays of skill, and sources of knowledge binding a people together -- but also as challenges to non-Maori, occasions for debate, and even for revenge" (82). Orr's thought-provoking essay serves not only as an introduction to the complex relations between Maori and Pakeha cultures in New Zealand, but provides a brilliant reading that significantly contributes to our understanding of the novel's position within the discourse of postcolonial theory.

Though the works Orr reads may be relatively unfamiliar, Lynch assigns herself the monumental task of defamiliarizing the very canonical Jane Austen in order to examine how the "legitimizing models in which Austen's domestic fiction was reproduced illuminates rather different fractures in [England's] consensual notion about the unity of the national literature and national character" (161). Specifically, Lynch examines how Austen's fiction was deployed between 1918 and 1945 to negotiate the increasing clashes "between elite and mass culture, between 'the realist novel' and 'romance fiction'" (163). While Austen's works became the entrepot of "Englishness" in this period, establishing a national past which buttressed state-sanctioned notions of the national present, the creation of the Austen canon as the equivalent of the English country house was and continues to be problematic. Lynch identifies and locates these problems by reading Austen within the discourses of interwar England's literary establishment as well as alongside the rise of the gentrified detective fiction of Dorothy Sayers and the "escapist" literature of the Regency romance of Georgette Heyer. The former uses Austen to "establish her [or its] distance from romance and . . . obtain high culture credentials" while the latter aligns itself with Austen by privileging the private over the public while evoking historical accuracy and thus legitimacy by its obsessive attention to details of the period. Critics of this time such as Lillian Robinson expressed class-inflicted fears that "the categorical difference. . .between Austen's literature and Heyer's trash is now a difference for only a few" (190). Through close analysis of a specific historical period and its competing discourses, Lynch more than succeeds in her goal of "releasing [Austen] from that closed context [of the classical novel], to return it to its multiple historicities and multiple textualities" (190).

To do justice to the many innovative essays in Cultural Institutions of the Novel is outside the scope of this review, but the two essays examined here are representative of the insightful and original readings offered. The work as a whole fills a gap in novel studies by providing a series of stimulating readings that redefine what and how the novel works, providing a powerful research and pedagogical tool that may help to change the question in college classrooms from what the novel is (or isn't in most cases) to what novels do.