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Re-visioning the scene of the novel in the pivotal decades around 1800, Romantic Fiction and Literary Excess in the Minerva Press Era enacts a dispersal and a relocation. Dissolving the fictional energies typically constellated in the category of “Romantic” fiction, it reinserts them into the contentious zone of emergence when a rapid escalation in the production of fiction, led by the Minerva Press, triggered widespread debate over the function and literary status of the novel. In renaming this moment the “Minerva Press Era,” Hannah Hudson shifts the center of gravity in the fictional field, locating its crucial force in the publisher whose name rapidly became (and long lingered) a byword for prolific production of voluminous and formulaic novels. The literary pressures and problems represented by the Minerva Press, Hudson argues, “affected all novel-writers and their works” (14); at the same time, the vast “body” of Minerva novels exerted a “quasi-gravitational pull” on the entire fictional field (13). Her designation thus moves into the foreground the question of quantity as formative condition in the development of Romantic fiction, and the book hones in on the period’s “obsession with overproduction of novels” (16). Revisiting the critique leveled at fiction, it traces the “complicated ramifications of (over)abundance” on the practice of fiction across several registers (15). The project has two related aims: to conduct a reconsideration of quantity as a determinant of value in the construction of the Romantic-era novelistic field; and to effect a “reorientation” in critical approaches to Romantic fiction “that directs our attention to the collective rather than the singular” (23).
Hudson pursues these objectives by bringing into close-up view an expanded scene of Romantic novel-writing. Impeccably researched (primary sources take up over half of the 22-page Bibliography), the book intermingles well-known writers with those lesser or unknown (predominantly Minerva authors) in a set of case studies focusing on different fictional modes. The concept of excess, master trope of the period critique of fiction, anchors the book and provides its critical framework. Pressing in on the implications of the term, Hudson mobilizes the imbrication of positive and negative value inherent in the charge of overpassing a line. As she points out, the negative concept assumes “the existence of a positive sufficiency” (9): what exceeds is...