Born Yesterday: Inexperience and the Early Realist Novel

The early novel was not the coming-of-age story we know today—eighteenth-century adolescent protagonists remained in a constant state of arrested development, never truly maturing. Between the emergence of the realist novel in the early eighteenth century and the novel's subsequent alignment with self-improvement a century later lies a significant moment when novelistic characters were unlikely to mature in any meaningful way. That adolescent protagonists poised on the cusp of adulthood resisted a headlong tumble into maturity through the workings of plot reveals a curious literary and philosophical counter-tradition in the history of the novel. Stephanie Insley Hershinow's Born Yesterday shows how the archetype of the early realist novice reveals literary character tout court. Through new readings of canonical novels by Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen, Hershinow severs the too-easy tie between novelistic form and character formation, a conflation, she argues, of Bild with Bildung. A pop-culture-infused epilogue illustrates the influence of the eighteenth-century novice, as embodied by Austen's Emma, in the 1995 film Clueless, as well as in dystopian YA works like The Hunger Games. Drawing on bold close readings, Born Yesterday alters the landscape of literary historical eighteenth-century studies and challenges some of novel theory's most well-worn assumptions.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Introduction. Entering the World 1. Clarissa's Conjectural History: The Novel and the Novice 2. When Experience Matters (and When It Doesn't): Tom Jones and the Rake's Regress 3. Simple and Sublime: The Otherworldly of Ann Radcliffe's Gothic 4. Starting from Scratch: Frances Burney and the Appeals of Inexperience Epilogue. Emma's Dystopia Notes Index

About the Author :
Stephanie Insley Hershinow is an assistant professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York.

Review :
Hershinow makes a compelling claim that the character of the novice represents a high point in the art of the novel. What makes her argument compelling is how she inhabits the novels at the level of the sentence, taking her vocabulary from the novelists. —Critical Inquiry Ultimately, to read this book was to confirm my suspicion that the best close readers are the best writers of literary criticism. The good reader takes pleasure in nuance and complexity; the good writer tends to repeat the qualities that inspired that pleasure. Hershinow's readings, in other words, are filled with the insights of discerning study; her prose is filled with wit and humor, always intellectually serious but also gracefully playful in a way uncommon in academic writing . . . Brimming with possibility—both as a whole and even at the level of the sentence—this book embodies the spirit of the vibrant characters it studies. —LA Review of Books The really radical implication of Born Yesterday is that character change itself is simply the wrong way to think about the category of experience in the novel . . . Hershinow does not shy away from pop-culture references, in part to challenge a conception of literary culture that is dismissive of girls and their aesthetic preferences. The payoff is as much stylistic as polemical. Lively and brimming with wit, Born Yesterday conveys through voice the impression of its author as a savvy and companionable guide to a selection of canonical novels she loves without apology. —Eighteenth-Century Studies Stephanie Insley Hershinow deftly lays out an argument that is both straightforward and dazzlingly complex, and which opens out onto myriad aspects of novel studies, from the complex ways that eighteenth-century fiction combines a drive toward mimetic realism with a tendency to idealize, to more fundamental questions of how we understand the relationship between plot and character . . . This exciting and invigorating work of scholarship will doubtless prove beneficial both to researchers and to teachers, for its economical, spirited chapters lend themselves beautifully to classroom use. Born Yesterday gives us new frameworks to think about the texts it examines, but it also invites us to revisit our ideas of character, plot, and adolescence in powerfully creative ways. —Eighteenth-Century Fiction Stephanie Hershinow offers a compelling counterargument that casts adolescent protagonists or "no-vices" who do not change as a "central, affirmative component of the novelproject" in this period. —De Gruyter Even after a decade that has produced a slew of arresting readings of Clarissa, I think this chapter will be a touchstone for future discussions of the novel. —Eighteenth Century Fiction Hershinow teaches us to conceive of novels as thought experiments about resilience in the face of how things really were. Even more significantly, she encourages us to examine character closely to perceive how things should have been and to imagine how things could be. —The Eighteenth Century Hershinow's is not the first study to question the classic assumption that novelistic characters are defined by interiority or development. But the analysis of Born Yesterday has interesting implications for the kind of affection this genre might command.... The novice, as Hershinow eloquently insists, allows an 'embedded utopianism' to emerge from within the novel. —Yoon Sun Lee, Public Books