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HAYWOOD Croskery, Margaret Case. "Novel Romanticism in 1751: Eliza Haywood's Betsy Thoughtless," Enlightening Romanticism, Romancing the Enlightenment: British Novels from 1750-1832, ed. Miriam L. Wallace. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. Pp. 2137.
In order to claim Haywood's Betsy Thoughtless as a "Romantic" novel, Ms. Croskery ably contextualizes it within the story of the early novel's struggle for respectability, for negotiating the "double bind" between the "didactic social justification" of the novel as able to "instruct" versus the ways "its aesthetic definition and popularity depended on its ability to delight." This problem for the early novel has been frequently discussed, but her innovation is in using Haywood's novel as a test case for one Romantic resolution to the problem. In an era when it was difficult to "sanction a cultural commodity that encouraged affective involvement"-the more...