Eighteenth-Century Fiction

REVIEWS235 theme of the wanderer and the ideal of transcendence, though they did so in order to intervene in ways that differ markedly from their canonical male counterparts. The cumulative effect of these essays, which are marked by their interdisciplinary and historically rigorous approaches, is to highlight the simultaneous common ground and extreme diversity of women writers in the period as they trespassed into the forbidden terrain of political debate. The cumulative effect of reading these three books together is an impressive sense of the extent to which the expansion beyond the limits of the traditional canon has been accompanied by a sense of greatly expanded theoretical and historical possibilities. If, as Craciun and Lokke argue, they also suggest how much more important work remains to be done, they provide a valuable sense of some of the critical directions this might entail. Paul Keen Carleton University Barbara K. Seeber. General Consent inJaneAusten: A Study in Dialogism. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2000. viii+160pp. ISBN 0-7735-2066-X. Like those ink drawings that appear to be one thing from one angle of vision—two faces, for example—and something quite different from another perspective—a wine glass or a vase—Jane Austen can change shape dramatically depending on who is reading her and how. The critical tradition has viewed Austen at various points as a limited talent, a consummate genius, an upholder of the status quo, a critic of the established order, an antijacobin, a revolutionary, and so forth. The past two decades have seen more nuanced readings of Austen's work with closer attention to the complexities of the gender system, representations of imperialism, and other areas of inquiry that challenge earlier visions of a genteel and gentleJane. Still, scholars continue to disagree about where Austen stands in relation to many key issues, the central debate revolving around her status as either a conservative or a subversive author. Barbara K Seeber seeks to resolve this debate by applying a Bakhtinian perspective to Austen's œuvre and exploring the "dialogic nature of her work" in order to "make sense of the contradictions and complexities that seem to riddle Austen's texts." "How," Seeber asks, "can her novels be seen as conservative by some and yet radically subversive by others?" (p. 14). In dialogic fashion, the book relies heavily on quotation. The voices of Bakhtin, Althusser, and numerous Austen scholars come into dialogue with Seeber and the novels themselves. Seeber further resists monologue by offering up potentially contradictory readings of individual novels and by 236EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION14:2 declaring her own partialities, as when she says that in her work "Mansfield Park receives the most attention because it is of special interest to me" (p. 17) with no further explanation as to why this is so. The book's format, too, could be described as polyphonic. Rather than offering up five to six long chapters with extended elaborations of a central argument, as do so many single-author studies, Seeber subdivides the eleven chapters of her text into three parts, each with an introduction. With a preface, general introduction , conclusion, and afterword—all in less than one hundred and fifty pages of prose—it could hardly be characterized as monologic. Seeber organizes her work around three "paradigms" that disrupt a unified reading of the texts in which they appear. The first is the "other heroine," a character who competes with the protagonist for centre stage, whose story must be suppressed for the sake ofgeneral concord, but who ultimately raises questions that the text cannot resolve. The second paradigm is the "narrative cameo," a story such as that of the two Elizas in Sense and Sensibility. The narrative cameo contradicts the progressive forward movement of the text towards a comfortable resolution by bringing past events into the present and leading readers to question the stability of that resolution . Both of Seeber's first two paradigms invite readers to view familiar elements within individual works from an angle that yields fresh local insights . For example, she rightly argues that critics have accepted Harriet Smith's dull secondary status without examining the class basis of her exclusion from the privileges and prestige...