Deidre Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998. ISBN: 0-226-49819-0 (cloth); 0-226-49820-4 (paper). Price: $45 (cloth); $18 (paper).

In The Economy of Character Deidre Lynch does for the evolution of the novel what Michael Denning did more than a decade ago for nineteenth-century 'cheap fiction': she shows how the interpretive grids readers constructed around fictional characters helped them negotiate the subtleties of a shifting economy and the changing expectations and demographics of readership. The Economy of Character considers the literary character, reading practices, and book-marketing strategies as barometers of the 'changing ways in which British men and women in the long eighteenth century accommodated themselves to their increasingly commercial society' and the rise of the middle class (1). Lynch begins by calling into question the usual taxonomies of character found in conventional literary praxis which validate and naturalize a concept of character as representational. Her work interrogates the traditional hierarchical positioning in these treatments, which privilege complex and 'realistic' treatments of character over simpler ones, and concentrates instead on what she calls a 'pragmatics of character' (4)—-the ways in which eighteenth-century readers and writers used the characters in their books. Lynch's reading centers mainly around the adjustment of author and audience to newly-evolving and changing social relationships and a newly-commercialized world, made manifest in the opening of global trade routes and the rise of credit and retail practices. It is in the Romantic period, Lynch points out, that characters first prompted readers to conceive of them as beings who take on an independent life, and who can escape their social contexts. She points to a 'Caveat Emptor' as an 'unspoken motto of "the character business''' (3) which has its roots in the Romanticesque assessments of literary critics. Carlyle, for example, proclaimed as the genuine article those characters with the greatest verisimilitude, and vilified the 'hollow vizards' of the counterfeit, 'painted' variety. Under such critical directives the task of the reader was to distinguish the 'real' from the spurious; but here Lynch aims to give critical studies of the novel a post-romantic way to consider eighteenth-century readers, who, she claims, were interested not in a character's realism, but (in ways which reflect a new, commodity-driven culture) in standards by which characters were grotesque and exaggerated or natural and economical. As the high art of the period set about distinguishing itself against popular and amateur art through its alliance with an ideal of 'pictorial abstemiousness,' (59) overelaborated characters came to be seen as low and bawdy, and 'inferior' forms became identified with excess. In the work of Burney and her heirs Lynch sees femininity itself redefined as what remains behind after the decorous frills of female attire have been stripped aside, and Camilla is seen as a warning which 'depicts the harm shopping does to women' (179). Playing off one of many puns she uncovers with exhaustive etymological work, Lynch means the title of the book, and its major theme, to signify 'economy' in both the sense of market culture, and the degree of prudence and austerity with which authors were expected by critical standards to flesh out their characters. And inscribed in these discursive transformations, she argues, are new protocols for organizing class and gender relations. As she moves forward to an engagement with 'Romantic-period reading relations' Lynch's primary objective is to expose as a fiction the 'romantic-era story about the spirit of the age' (123) which seeks to cast history as the story of a return to nature and oneself. Under this agenda, still prevalent among some literary historians and put forward by Cold War generation critics like Robert Langbaum, the 'round' characters existed within flat characters all along and stand in as fictional representatives of unrealized potential …