Norton's book is an excellent read and an important study of new constructions of happiness in the 18th century. During the Enlightenment, Norton shows, happiness became desynonymized with virtue; in philosophy and literature, happiness and associated questions of 'the good life'–even the very conception of the summum bonum–diverged sharply from both Aristotelian ethics and the Christian anticipation of happiness hereafter. Norton explores the ways in which relativist and subjectivist delimiting of individual happiness as a state of personal contentment rather than as an ethical pursuit shape the rhetoric of fiction in Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Diderot's Rameau's Nephew, Rousseau's Julie, Godwin's Caleb Williams, and, particularly welcome, Mary Hays's Emma Courtney. The book is well informed by Enlightenment philosophy, in particular some unfamiliar 18th-century treatises on happiness . . . [T]he close readings Norton provides are incisive, accessible, and rewarding, and each chapter is brilliantly conceived and executed. An important contribution to the growing body of work on literature and ethics, this volume suggests approaches for other works not considered here. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.
