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cgcunard's review
I have a lot to say about this book, but very little idea of how I might rate it -- largely because the genre of this text, whatever it is, isn't something that I've ever really encountered before and I feel as though any rating I might give would have more to do with my inability to "get" the generic context than with any real sense of the text's value.
I knew going into The New Atalantis that it was a roman a clef satire. What I didn't realize was how promiscuous the satire would be -- I started making a chart of characters at the beginning of reading, but by the end it was clear that this wouldn't be at all helpful, since there are easily 100+ characters in this less-than-300-pg novel, and my grasp of the history of the Restoration and early C18 isn't good enough to actually know who all these characters are meant to stand in for without footnotes. And yet, the fact that there ARE footnotes -- some of them collated from marginalia in existing old copies of the text! -- suggests that it would have been eminently possible for contemporary readers to understand Manley's references. (I mean, she was jailed between publication of Part I and Part II for libel!)
I'm not used to dealing with prose fiction that doesn't tell a single continuous story. I don't even really like it when slightly later novels are more episodic in their structure (see: Tom Jones). And I don't think it's just the satire that makes for this episodic structure. I read large portions of Aphra Behn's Love Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister last semester, a similar text and an obvious precursor to Manley's, but in that text it's a lot easier to see what starts out as a strict political allegory/satire turn into a narrative in its own right. Here, some of the inset narratives start to make this kind of transformation, slowly enlarging themselves to take up more and more space in the text, but they're always curtailed. That felt strange to me, and it also meant that ti was really difficult to follow any individual plot.
But it's also the case that the plots kept repeating themselves! I've never read a text that contained so many variations on basic seduction and/or adultery plots (with a lot of bigamy and incest thrown in for good measure). It made the repeating and episodic structure of [b:Love in Excess|351287|Love in Excess|Eliza Haywood|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1173992230s/351287.jpg|341520] seem fairly minimalist by comparison! (It's also worth noting that Haywood is certainly working in a tradition in which Manley is a major player: having read Haywood first, it was easy to see which plots were being lifted almost wholesale from some of the earlier political allegories I've read by Behn and Manley.)
And then, as though the book weren't weird enough, it just sort of ends. It's not interested in doing narrative the way that most novels are interested in doing narrative (though it's certainly interested in the effect narratives have on their readers -- especially when those narratives are romances and their readers are women). It's not interested in a lot of things that I've come to take for granted as the dominant traits of 18th-c prose fiction. And it's important to me for these reasons: it reminds me how many of my assumptions aren't actually valid yet in 1709, and might not really be valid for a while after that, even if the works currently in the canon tend to confirm them.
I knew going into The New Atalantis that it was a roman a clef satire. What I didn't realize was how promiscuous the satire would be -- I started making a chart of characters at the beginning of reading, but by the end it was clear that this wouldn't be at all helpful, since there are easily 100+ characters in this less-than-300-pg novel, and my grasp of the history of the Restoration and early C18 isn't good enough to actually know who all these characters are meant to stand in for without footnotes. And yet, the fact that there ARE footnotes -- some of them collated from marginalia in existing old copies of the text! -- suggests that it would have been eminently possible for contemporary readers to understand Manley's references. (I mean, she was jailed between publication of Part I and Part II for libel!)
I'm not used to dealing with prose fiction that doesn't tell a single continuous story. I don't even really like it when slightly later novels are more episodic in their structure (see: Tom Jones). And I don't think it's just the satire that makes for this episodic structure. I read large portions of Aphra Behn's Love Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister last semester, a similar text and an obvious precursor to Manley's, but in that text it's a lot easier to see what starts out as a strict political allegory/satire turn into a narrative in its own right. Here, some of the inset narratives start to make this kind of transformation, slowly enlarging themselves to take up more and more space in the text, but they're always curtailed. That felt strange to me, and it also meant that ti was really difficult to follow any individual plot.
But it's also the case that the plots kept repeating themselves! I've never read a text that contained so many variations on basic seduction and/or adultery plots (with a lot of bigamy and incest thrown in for good measure). It made the repeating and episodic structure of [b:Love in Excess|351287|Love in Excess|Eliza Haywood|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1173992230s/351287.jpg|341520] seem fairly minimalist by comparison! (It's also worth noting that Haywood is certainly working in a tradition in which Manley is a major player: having read Haywood first, it was easy to see which plots were being lifted almost wholesale from some of the earlier political allegories I've read by Behn and Manley.)
And then, as though the book weren't weird enough, it just sort of ends. It's not interested in doing narrative the way that most novels are interested in doing narrative (though it's certainly interested in the effect narratives have on their readers -- especially when those narratives are romances and their readers are women). It's not interested in a lot of things that I've come to take for granted as the dominant traits of 18th-c prose fiction. And it's important to me for these reasons: it reminds me how many of my assumptions aren't actually valid yet in 1709, and might not really be valid for a while after that, even if the works currently in the canon tend to confirm them.
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