Reviewed by:

• When Novels Were Books by Jordan Alexander Stein
• Sonia Hazard

Novels are books, but they are much else besides. Novels are also a genre, typically understood to consist of formal qualities including fictional prose and a focus [End Page 200] on characters. The meaning of the enigmatic title of Jordan Alexander Stein’s When Novels Were Books becomes clear in its opening pages where readers will learn that, in mid-eighteenth-century Britain, the defining characteristic of what are today called “novels” was that they were books in a material sense. If novels of that era could be said to have a genre, it was tied to their physicality as books and not to their literary form or content. That novels were books is only the first of many defamiliarizations in a monograph that takes aim at literary common sense, asking scholars to look again and aslant at novels and the stories they tell about them. Though When Novels Were Books is filled with revisionist insights, for this short review I will boil them down to two overall arguments: that what are now called “the literary” and “the religious” were not separable circa 1750, and that their division by the 1790s was an ironic development that had more to do with the choices of some elite Protestants than the triumph of novelistic form.

The introduction begins by demonstrating the material continuities between novels and religious devotional works, or what Stein says that he “shall anachronistically call ‘books of piety’” (126). Unlike prestigious folios (two leaves to a sheet), novels like Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Pamela (1740) were formatted by printers in octavo (eight leaves to a sheet) or duodecimo (twelve leaves to a sheet). These were identical to the humble formats of contemporary books of piety such as Jonathan Edwards’s Life of David Brainerd (1749) and eighteenth-century reprints of nonconformist classics like John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) and Joseph Alleine’s Alarme to the Unconverted (1672). Though today scholars consign Edwards, Bunyan, and other Protestant writers to a different genre entirely, eighteenth-century readers did not discriminate based on religious content. They saw novels and books of piety as belonging to the same category—the small-format book. As Stein posits in a summary aphorism, “format indicates genre for many books in the handpress period” (3).

The next three chapters cover more of the continuities among novels and books of piety circa 1750. In chapters One and Two, Stein engages in characterological analysis, demonstrating how novels were not the only texts that emphasized complex human figures and courted the reader’s feelings of identification. Books of piety equally did these things, and in ways that drew on long traditions of self-writing in Christianity. Here Stein is most interested in tracing the development and spread of the “negative characterological figure” (53), understood as weak and vulnerable (and not the bootstrapping liberal individual that scholars of the novel have tended to focus on). The immediate textual progenitors for negative figurations, examined in detail, are seventeenth-century Reformed confessions such as Thomas Shepard’s Sincere Convert (1640). Stein goes on to trace a genealogy back through Calvin’s Institutes (1536) and even all the way to Augustine’s Confessions (397–400). (My only cavil is that the line stretched a bit too thin for me during an extended discussion of late antique Christianity, especially when there are so many other more closely neighboring religious candidates for the shaping of “character,” for instance, Lutheran Pietism or early modern Catholic forms of humanism and spirituality.)

Christianity furnished direct inspiration for the characters of eighteenth-century novels like Robinson Crusoe, especially via the influence of seventeenth-century steady sellers. While there was no single connecting hinge, Stein convincingly argues that

Crusoe bears significant formal continuities with negative figurations of character, that such negative figurations of character had a long and significant gestation as part of some of Christianity’s complex theories of representation, [End Page 201] and that the class of books now recognized by bibliographers as devotional steady sellers were...

审核人：

• 当小说是乔丹·亚历山大·斯坦因的书时
• 索尼娅·哈泽德

小说是书，但除此之外还有很多其他的东西。小说也是一种类型，通常被理解为由形式特征组成，包括虚构的散文和对人物的关注[End Page 200]。乔丹·亚历山大·斯坦 (Jordan Alexander Stein) 的《当小说是书》 ( When Novels Were Books)的神秘标题的含义在其开头几页变得清晰起来，读者将了解到，在 18 世纪中叶的英国，今天所谓的“小说”的定义特征是它们是书在物质意义上。如果说那个时代的小说有一种体裁，那么它与它们作为书籍的物理性质有关，而不是与它们的文学形式或内容有关。小说就是书，这只是一本以文学常识为目标的专着中众多陌生化中的第一个，要求学者重新审视并斜视小说及其讲述的故事。虽然《当小说是书》充满了修正主义的见解，在这篇简短的评论中，我将它们归结为两个总体论点：现在所谓的“文学”和“宗教”在 1750 年前后是不可分离的，并且它们的划分由1790 年代是一个具有讽刺意味的发展，它更多地与一些精英新教徒的选择有关，而不是小说形式的胜利。

引言首先展示了小说和宗教虔诚作品之间的物质连续性，或者斯坦因所说的“不合时宜地称之为‘虔诚之书’”（126）。与著名的对开本（一张纸两页）不同，像鲁滨逊漂流记（1719 年）和帕梅拉（1740年）这样的小说是通过八度（每张八页）或十二页（每张十二页）打印机格式化的。这些与当代虔诚书籍的简陋格式相同，例如乔纳森·爱德华兹的《大卫·布雷纳德的一生》（1749 年）和 18 世纪不墨守成规的经典重印本，如约翰·班扬的《朝圣者的进步》（1678 年）和约瑟夫·阿莱纳的《未皈依者的警报》(1672)。尽管今天的学者将爱德华兹、班扬和其他新教作家完全归于不同的流派，但 18 世纪的读者并没有根据宗教内容进行歧视。他们认为小说和虔诚的书籍属于同一类别——小型书。正如斯坦因在总结格言中所断定的那样，“格式表明手印时期许多书籍的体裁”（3）。

接下来的三章涵盖了更多关于 1750 年左右的小说和虔诚书籍之间的连续性。在第一章和第二章中，斯坦因进行了性格分析，展示了小说如何不是唯一强调复杂人物形象并吸引读者认同感的文本. 虔诚的书籍同样做到了这些事情，而且方式借鉴了基督教自我写作的悠久传统。在这里，斯坦最感兴趣的是追踪“消极性格人物”（53）的发展和传播，被理解为软弱和脆弱（而不是小说学者倾向于关注的自力更生的自由主义个体）。详细检查后，否定形象的直接文本祖先是 17 世纪的改革宗忏悔，如托马斯·谢泼德 (Thomas Shepard)真诚的转换（1640）。斯坦因继续追溯加尔文研究所（1536 年）甚至奥古斯丁的忏悔录（397-400年）的家谱。（我唯一的不满是，在对晚期古代基督教的长时间讨论中，这条线对我来说有点太细了，尤其是当有许多其他更接近的宗教候选人来塑造“性格”时，例如，路德宗虔诚主义或早期现代天主教形式的人文主义和灵性。）

基督教为鲁滨逊漂流记等 18 世纪小说的人物提供了直接的灵感，尤其是通过 17 世纪稳定卖家的影响。虽然没有单一的连接铰链，但斯坦因令人信服地认为

克鲁索具有重要的形式上的连续性和消极的性格形象，这种消极的性格形象在基督教的一些复杂的表征理论中有着漫长而重要的孕育，[End Page 201]并且现在被书目学家认为是虔诚的稳定卖家是...