Regulating Readers

Regulating Readers

Gender and Literary Criticism in the Eighteenth-Century Novel

Ellen Gardiner

An important contribution to the study of authorship and criticism, Regulating Readers adds to a growing body of scholarship by women which shows eighteenth-century women writers in positions of agency, and as envisioning for themselves authoritative critical positions and roles in the public sphere. Bringing into dialogue novels and periodicals authored by men and women, Gardiner uncovers the ways in which eighteenth-century fiction helped to shape professional critical practices and to define the role and function of the professional critic in the eighteenth century. Twentieth-century scholars have hitherto traced the rise of professional criticism only to mid-eighteenth-century periodicals, and have virtually ignored women's role in that history by focusing primarily on the relation between the male critic and the public sphere over time. Gardiner argues that it is in the eighteenth-century novel that women, as well as men, most often and self-consciously wage a battle to set the terms in which their fiction will be discussed, and urge that the literary establishment give women equal voice in the profession of criticism.

Her study begins by demonstrating how eighteenth-century periodicals helped to define the terms of the debate for professional critical authority that would occur later in the century, focusing particularly on its obsession with reading and readers, and its development of an ideology of criticism based largely on gender and class distinctions. Through close readings of Addison and Steele's The Spectator and Eliza Haywood's The Female Spectator, Gardiner addresses such questions as: How do male-authored periodicals portray men and women as readers? How do writers define various interpretive positions and roles for members of society through language? According to these periodicals, who occupies an authoritative critical position in the public space of print culture? How do women write themselves and other women as readers?

Turning her attention to the fiction of the mid century and beyond, Gardiner examines the underlying sociohistorical and personal circumstances that influence the depictions of an ideal professional critic by Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, Sarah Fielding (with Jane Collier), and Jane Austen. She argues that all five novelists appropriate, interrogate, and transform the spectator-as-reader trope first developed in The Spectator and The Female Spectator as they jockey for critical authority in their novels. Especially through her discussion of the women novelists, Gardiner documents the displacement of the battle for literary critical authority from the world of novelists and Grub Street hacks to the academy in the twentieth century. Gardiner's study enriches, expands, and transforms the heretofore narrow and received vision of the history of criticism