& --- Görlach, Manfred (1999). English in Nineteenth-Century England: An Introduction. Cambridge: CUP. Häcker, Martina (2003). “From Linking [h] to Glottal Stop: Changes in the Phonotactic System of 20th-Century Cockney”. In: Cornelia Tschichold (ed). English Core Linguistics: Essays in Honour of D.J. Allerton. Bern: Lang. 31-53. Häcker, Martina (2005). “Linking [h] and the Variation between Linking [r] and Glottal Onsets in South African English. In: Cornelia Tschichold and David Spurr (eds.). The Space of English. (Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature, 17). Tübingen: Narr. 207-227. Häcker, Martina (2006). “The Origins and History of [h]-insertion and [h]-loss in English: A Corpus-Based Investigation”. [Unpublished Habilitation dissertation, University of Freiburg]. Milroy, Lesley (1980). Language and Social Networks. Oxford: Blackwell. 0 / - # (+ = . / 2 * < G > D 9 D ) + $) 7 ) F6 6 , - ( 1 # , A ) *$ > , ( DH * The study of beginnings of literary texts is as notoriously complex as it is rewarding, since beginnings prove to be very elusive on just about every conceptual level. Beginnings can be made, experienced or determined, they can be points in time as well as longer durations, and they can be actions, too - and this is just the beginning of it. Yet what makes them valuable subjects of analysis is that they are always “over-determined moments in narrative performance” (151), sites of an excess of meaning, always important nodes in the network of what follows them. Every student must have learned in school that the first line of any text deserves special attention, and every journalist knows that this is the line you have to get right, no matter what follows. Yet literary studies has considered beginnings in many more ways than these, and the study under review here - Interfaces of Fiction: Initial Framings in the American Novel from 1790 to 1900 by Christian Quendler - is an excellent example of just how varied and fruitful these considerations can be. Quendler offers a very insightful and thorough analysis of framing practices in American novels published in the Early Republic, the American Renaissance and the Gilded Age (a time line according to which his book is structured). Focusing on beginnings as well as paratextual framings and material aspects of books, he considers them as “historical and culture-specific signposts that illuminate the positions and functions of novelistic fiction in the social and literary landscape of the nine- & teenth century” (1), although his study points beyond that time frame towards modernist and postmodernist fiction as well. Broadly speaking, he defines frames as “cognitive tools by which we navigate through our symbolic universe” (9), though he also emphasizes that this cognitive element must be understood to be social as well. Frames have the function of establishing coherence within a given system and thus also enable communication; in the case of novels, this means that their framings set the discursive stage for a certain relation between text, writer and reader while emplacing them within their respective cultural and historical contexts. While these framings are certainly not limited to beginnings, Quendler is especially interested in initial framings, since he identifies them as special sites where “the desire to explore new functions of novelistic fiction and to make new inroads into hitherto unexplored realms of social discourse” (25) is most pertinent. Methodologically, Quendler moves elegantly between the fields of material and visual culture, frame theory, history, and literary studies (with a special focus on narratology); he is as comfortable carrying out close readings of texts as he is outlining the historical and economic context of writing and publishing novels in broad strokes. His analysis of framing practices is based on some 450 novels published in the time span under consideration, and Quendler has found the appropriate way of dealing with this large corpus. He avoids the danger of overwhelming readers with a statistical or numerical approach; instead, he directly offers the conclusions he draws from his material and supports them by focusing on an example that illustrates the larger argument for the reader. It is no drawback that Quendler keeps his readers somewhat removed from the corpus of texts by avoiding quantitative data, but it is rather an asset that makes this study a compelling and entertaining read. The thesis quoted above is itself the beginning of many others: Quendler’s study proves to be as rich as it is versatile. For example, it is a narrative of the rise of the American novel as it moves from its struggle with Puritan “antifictional prejudice” (46) towards a nationalist agenda and ultimately an assertion of its own aesthetic autonomy. The frames of illustrations, epigraphs, dedications, title pages, etc. indicate how American fiction moved away from its early “low prestige” (31) and dependence on English conventions as well as on the “generic frames of history and (auto-)biography” (40) towards the literary products that catered to a growing mass market as they increasingly diversified and sought to play “a more active part in the constitution of reality” (128). Quendler manages to tell this overarching story of the American novel while at the same time offering many noteworthy details along the way, so that the book successfully combines two levels that are all too often separated in critical texts. It would certainly serve well in any class on the American novel as an introduction to its historical, social, political, economic and aesthetic context, and despite its specialization on a particular approach to literature will give a useful overview of its subject to newcomers, especially as it is written in an accessible and lucid style; at the same time, it offers many new insights even to advanced readers, or refreshes familiar arguments by supporting them from an angle that is often unduly ignored. & A brief enumeration, by no means complete, may indicate this scope. Along the way on the path of this literary history told via frame theory, Quendler offers new perspectives on the problematic distinction between novel and romance by looking at the way these terms were used together in prefaces of the Early Republic period to serve the function of legitimization. He also convincingly discusses the changing concept of authorship, which especially during the American Renaissance began to receive a “positive acknowledgement” that is interpreted as a sign of the “growing independence of fiction as a social discourse” (88). This is in turn related to economic aspects, in particular to practices of publishing, marketing and selling fiction to a large audience, all of which is indicated by contemporary framing practices that also attest to the respective power of the writer, publisher or printer. (It is only regrettable that advertising is not granted a more central role in this section.) Especially the titles of novels prove to be a very fertile ground for interpretation, since they speak of (changes of) concerns, thought and representation that are important in a literary, social, and even philosophical respect: the “continuous development of diminishing titular references to human agents in the history of the American novel” (83-84) which Quendler identifies implies a fundamental change in the conception of not only what a novel does or should be concerned with, but also of the human subject in relation to the world. Observations such as these show that the study is not limited to details of framing that only pertain to a particular text, but that these beginnings can indeed be used to gain insight about a larger context without making hasty generalizations. Very importantly, Quendler presents literary texts throughout as artefacts of visual culture, not only with regard to illustrations, but also in terms of textual materiality. This is especially instructive as such visual elements are all too often only considered by critics when the text in question obviously seems to be ‘out of the ordinary’ or ‘experimental’ while it is usually not taken into account that this is based on assumptions of what we have come to expect of a ‘normal’ novel, and that these conventions have not only changed through time, but also carry meaning. Quendler also offers many interpretations on a textual level that combine a narratological with a New Historicist approach. He is especially interested in how framings negotiate or “reconcile private and individual aspects of reading fiction with its social functions as a practice of cultural communication” (61), thereby becoming the ‘interfaces of fiction’ which the title promises. In order to address this question, Quendler traces the changing role of framings as intermediate spaces between fiction and reality, arguing for example that techniques such as the epistolary form in the Early Republic served to downplay precisely the fictionality of the narration, while novels in the American Renaissance would rather simulate oral storytelling (103), often employing the technique of the “magic script,” which Quendler defines as an object of scripture that serves to forge “a link between the story and its mediation” (105), citing The Scarlet Letter as an example. Other novels of the period would parody traditional frames in order to engage the reader in an ontological play that blurs the boundary between reality and fiction in a way & that seems more postmodernist than Romantic; especially Quendler’s discussion of Melville gives a noteworthy example of such transgressive modes of framing. While Twain continues in a similar mode in the Gilded Age, particularly realist novels instead often aspire to effect “a seamless continuation of an extrafictional referential reality” (135) by “the subduing of narratorial framings” (163). At the same time, writers such as Henry James emphasize the “presentational craft of language” by insisting on the uniqueness of text in comparison to other media, thereby already pointing towards “the modernist preoccupation with the materiality of language” (121). In the conclusion to his study, Quendler follows this outlook on 20 th -century fiction further, outlining future possibilities of an “integrative study that is both textcentered and sensitive to historical and cultural contexts” (150) by virtue of its consideration of the beginnings, framings and interfaces of fiction. Indeed, readers of modernist and postmodernist fiction will often find cause to wonder throughout this work about the implications of this particular approach for these texts. They will find Quendler’s project a useful model for their own studies, itself a frame for future frame analysis; even though the theorization of frames and especially beginnings in the first chapter could have been more expansive, this minor deficit is balanced out by the profound practical analysis in the three main chapters. All in all, Interfaces of Fiction offers both novice and expert readers of American fiction a fascinating and well-written study that tells the story of the novel in the USA until 1900 from an unconventional angle. It can be read as a literary history as well as a narratological analysis, as a study in visual culture as well as in the materiality of the book and its contexts. This variety of perspectives, along with the massive corpus of texts considered, enables Quendler to provide readers with fresh insight even where he covers familiar territory; true to its concern with beginnings, the text itself shows that, in literary studies as in other disciplines, it is always worthwhile to begin again by taking a new look at what only seemed familiar. ( DH * -* 8 # 8 = #40 F * 4. / 0$