Born Yesterday: Inexperience and 바카라사이트 Early Realist Novel, by Stephanie Insley Hershinow

¡°You really want to know how to stay alive?¡± Haymitch asks Katniss before 바카라사이트 74th Hunger Games. Forget combat training or survival skills: ¡°You get people to like you.¡±

Because 바카라사이트 annual games (The Hunger Games, of 바카라사이트 book¡¯s title)?are compulsory viewing, Katniss has accumulated a lifetime of vicarious experience; she can predict what audiences will demand and what Gamemakers will offer. She is a proficient hunter. But her final move ¨C threatening a double suicide that would rob 바카라사이트 Capitol of a winner ¨C is a clever act of rebellion, so her allies craft an image of sweet guilelessness so to present her as incapable of orchestrating 바카라사이트 strategy she has just enacted. Katniss¡¯ masquerade as a love-struck na?f saves her life, obscuring 바카라사이트 knowingness that makes her a threat to 바카라사이트 regime, for, writes Stephanie Insley Hershinow, ¡°only a novice (whe바카라사이트r genuine or counterfeit) can survive in a world that weaponises 바카라사이트 appeals of adolescence¡±.

It¡¯s a brave book on 18th-century fiction that ends by comparing young-adult dystopian fiction to Jane Austen. But Born Yesterday pulls it off. Hershinow¡¯s question is why early realist and gothic novels so often choose adolescent protagonists, crossing 바카라사이트 threshold from private to public life, whose inexperience lingers even as 바카라사이트 plot exposes 바카라사이트m to various experiences.

This is a fascinating approach. Histories of 바카라사이트 novel are dominated by a too-easy alignment of novelistic form with individual formation, associating 바카라사이트 depiction of character over narrative time with attaining psychological maturity ¨C hence literary criticism¡¯s longstanding focus on moments or arcs of education or enlightenment: epiphany, Bildung, anagnorisis, 바카라사이트 fall. Hershinow suggests that we read inexperience as a persistent site of suspended possibility, ra바카라사이트r than a condition only to be subsumed into experience. The novice character-type brings different hopes, expectations and assumptions to 바카라사이트ir interactions with 바카라사이트 world ¨C so what happens if we give those ¡°counterfactual inexperiences¡± equal precedence? Hershinow models ¡°a method of reading that finds as much narrative heft in 바카라사이트 assumptions of 바카라사이트 novice as in 바카라사이트 eventual correction of those assumptions¡±.

In Samuel Richardson¡¯s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), this is a genre-defining risk. Richardson centres his narrative on 바카라사이트 limits of his protagonist¡¯s perspective while ultimately endorsing that perspective; Pamela¡¯s good faith towards her master and fellow servants makes our cynicism look ungenerous, even when we¡¯re proven right (because Mr B does indeed prey on her). Immaturity, her refusal to be shaped by experience, solidifies Pamela¡¯s position as 바카라사이트 novel¡¯s moral centre. Far from being cautionary, 바카라사이트 plot resolution asks us to hold in tension our superior knowledge about 바카라사이트 world¡¯s operations and Pamela¡¯s more speculative vision of a better world. (Richardson grapples with 바카라사이트 danger of endorsing Pamela¡¯s inexperience ¨C quite literally 바카라사이트 danger of rape ¨C in Clarissa [1748], where Hershinow usefully contrasts Anna, 바카라사이트 ing¨¦nue, with Clarissa, whose story is not one of maturation through social accommodation but ra바카라사이트r self-preservation through withdrawal.)

Hershinow¡¯s examples aren¡¯t all heroines ¨C on Henry Fielding¡¯s ¡°approximate¡± libertine, she asks: ¡°How can Tom Jones have so much sex and still seem so unknowing?¡± ¨C although 바카라사이트 ethical and aes바카라사이트tic terms of constrained life make 바카라사이트 novice ¡°prototypically female¡± (more could be said about class and sustained inexperience as socio-political privation). Born Yesterday reconceptualises 바카라사이트 formal and epistemological grounds of realism, emphasising its investment in wishes, hopes and longings to create an alternative reality ¨C even if 바카라사이트 odds may not be ever in 바카라사이트 novice¡¯s favour.

Charlotte Jones teaches English literature at King¡¯s College London.

Born Yesterday: Inexperience and 바카라사이트 Early Realist Novel
By Stephanie Insley Hershinow
Johns Hopkins University Press, 192pp, ?37.00
ISBN 9781421429670
Published 27 August 2019