Catch The Economy Of Character: Novels, Market Culture, And The Business Of Inner Meaning Documented By Deidre Shauna Lynch Expressed As Print

this book, Lynch retells the story of Britons relations to the imaginary people they encountered in books, refusing to tell the “history of character” in terms of the history of verisimilitude and individualism.
Instead, Lynch focuses on what she calls a “pragmatics of character,” investigating the ways in whichthcentury writers and readers used character to renegotiate social relations in their changed, commercialized worlda “world of moving objects” in which new forms of imagining and enforcing social division were requisite.
She argues that the Romantic valuation of “round,” “realistic,” psychologically complex characters is historically specific, and that to regard such characters as the most

“real” is to “commemorate the values of a handful of Romantic critics and canonmakers.
” By focusing on a pragmatics of character, Lynch reveals how qualities such as interiority and literariness are socially constructed, and offers a “postromantic” way of considering midthcentury literature and readers.
Lynch refuses to participate in the historical naïveté that lets one forget that characters do anything other than represent, Characterization, for Lynch, also serves a social function, memorializing institutionally sanctioned versions of what “the self” is or should be,


Part I: The Economies of Characteristic Writing

Neoclassical Theory Clashes with Lockean Empiricism

In the first part of her book, Lynch sets out to reconstruct the vantage point from which people who did not yet think of their reading in terms dictated by modern generic conceptions of literature read.
She writes that she wants to understand the socalled novels of the earlytomidth centuries as artifacts of the eras “typographical culture, ” She cites Lockes notion of the newborn mind as “white Paper, void of all Characters, without any ideas,” in order to underscore an analogy that links the getting of ideas, the techniques of typography, and the process of individuation.
Locke, of course, sought to refine language to develop a vocabulary that could describe reality more precisely, Drawn in a Lockean manner to refinement, practitioners of characteristic writing pursued the singularity that could not be coined within existing systems of names and categories they also pursued a more comprehensive, “truer” account of a diversifying population and a diversifying human nature.
On the other hand, Lynch shows how such particularity was looked down on as vulgar and frivolous by neoclassical literary, artistic, and theatrical theorists alike, all of which valued “discrete strokes.
” Lynch pays particular attention to Hogarth and Garrick here, High art set about defining itself in contradistinction to popular and amateur art by identifying itself with an ideal of “pictorial abstemiousness” and identifying others with excess, Thus members of the Royal Academy of Art insisted vehemently in the last four decades of the century that “real” art depended on the artists getting above “singular forms, local customs, and particularities.
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Characters of Circulation

Complaints that a Fielding or Smollett protagonist is “insufficiently characterizedthat he lacks individualitymiss the point, To a degree, this character is supposed to be a means for producing a sense of social context rather than the social context counting as a means for producing our sense of character: this character is the prosthetic device that enables readers to apprehend the comprehensive, impersonal systems that bind them together”.
Claude LeviStrauss has remarked that what happens when we consider miniatures, in contrast to what happens when we try to understand a living creature of real dimensions, is that knowledge of the whole precedes knowledge of the parts: his contrast suggests that what is at stake in this mode of characterization is the materializing of a new sort of social “whole,” that new medium that theth century invented to conceptualize persons interconnectedness.
Midcentury narratives make it easy for their protagonists to change places with or to be mistaken for others, They tend, Lynch notes, to emphasize the generalizability or typicality that endows the protagonist with his ability to describe the social worlds connectedness, Lynch fails to notice the way British literature outside her period, from Spencer to Dickens, has done the same thing to lesser and greater extents, In theth century, to think about such “nobodys” is also to think about a cartographic instrument made to map the social order from its lower depths to the very heights to which the most ambitious aspired she cites James the Old Pretender here.
Such “circulating protagonists” giver readers the wherewithal to conceptualize society as a whole,

Part II: Inside Stories

Langbaum defines “round” characters inas those that have “a residue of intelligence and will” that exceeds the requirements of the plot and that cannot be accounted for by it”.
Lynch reads the expanded inner life of literary charactersthe psychological depth of the new style of novelas an artifact of a new form of “selfculture” and as the mechanism of a new mode of class awareness.
She reminds us of the conventions that guide our Romantic interpretative practices today, in which, no matter how sensitive it is, no character reading can ever exhaust the meanings of an interiority which, it is understood, has slipped beneath the surface of words.
This postulate of a depth that can never finally be sounded ensured that aesthetic dispositions would receive repeated and regular workoutsexercises that would eventually help distinguish them in a newly arranged “economy of prestige.
” Finally, Lynch finishes off part II with chapters on Burney focusing on Camilla and The Wanderer and Austen,
Lynch complicates the line between the social and individual, arguing that character's "depth" is an illusion born of Romantic reading practices, For Lynch, readers use characters to reflect upon and define their own interiority in much the same way consumers use shopping as a way to refine one's taste and thus define one's self.
Lynch anticipates scholars such as Alan Palmer and Alex Woloch, while also refusing overly simplistic histories of the novel that stage the "development" of the novel on the ground of "flat"th century characters blooming into "round"th century characters.
At the start of the eighteenth century, talk of literary "characters" referred as much to letters and typefaces as it did to persons in books, Yet by the nineteenth century, characters had become the equals of their readers, friends with whom readers might spend time and empathize,

Although the story of this shift is usually told in terms of the "rise of the individual," Deidre Shauna Lynch proposes an ingenious alternative interpretation, Elaborating a "pragmatics of character," Lynch shows how readers used transactions with characters to accommodate themselves to newly commercialized social relations, Searching for the inner meanings of characters allowed readers both to plumb their own inwardness and to distinguish themselves from others, In a culture of mass consumption, argues Lynch, possessing a belief in the inexpressible interior life of a character rendered one's property truly private,

Ranging from Defoe and Smollett to Burney and Austen, Lynch's account will interest students of the novel, literary historians, and anyone concerned with the inner workings of consumer culture and the history of emotions.

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