New Directions in the History of the Novel

P. Parrinder, A. Nash, N. Wilson, P. Parrinder, A. Nash, N. Wilson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349439461, 9781137026972
• eBook ISBN: 9781137026989
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

New Directions in the History of the Novel challenges received views of literary history and sets out new areas for research. A re-examination of the nature of prose fiction in English and its study from the Renaissance to the 21st century, it will become required reading for teachers and students of the novel and its history.

1

Introduction

Patrick Parrinder, Andrew Nash and Nicola Wilson

What is a novel? How can we define, let alone write the history of, a genre sometimes said to be characterised by its unbounded plasticity? Can we plot the novel’s rise and predict its fall, or does any attempt at historical explanation require (as one writer has mockingly suggested) ‘the combined talents of a Linnaeus and a Procrustes’?¹

The novel, as its name implies, was, and perhaps still is, an innovation. Because it depends upon text rather than performance, on reading rather than oral recitation, it was not present at the dawn of human society as poetry and drama were. Novels differ from traditional storytelling both in their means of production – they are written, not spoken – and in their manner of reception. A novel requires a literate readership, and its reading is an individual and generally private act, not the collective response of an audience. A novel was until very recently a physical commodity that could be read by any literate person able to get their hands on a copy. Thanks to the e-reader, novels now exist in virtual as well as physical formats. Whether, in fact, the novel still retains its innovatory character – or whether the form’s English-language name should now be seen as anachronistic – is one of the questions this book debates.

Writing the histories of the novel

In this Introduction we begin with a brief sketch of the historiography of the novel in English, suggesting that it falls into three broadly overlapping tendencies. Using each adjective in the special sense that will be defined below, we call these literary, material and cultural history.

Literary history in the sense in which we use it here has as its primary aim the incorporation of the new form of the novel within the ‘literary system’.² Novels, that is, are appraised and explained in terms of a conceptual framework already attached to the existing body of literature. Typically the literary historian traces the novel’s origins and derivation from earlier forms such as classical epic, romance and myth, showing it as the product of individual authors adapting these more traditional modes to new and pressing ends. Material history, by contrast, argues that novels arose in response to new kinds of consumer demand, using methods of production and distribution that were not available at earlier stages of culture and society. Literary history in the sense specified above frequently takes its cue from Henry Fielding’s definition of the novel as a ‘comic epic poem in prose’, while material history leads to studies of the publication and reading of fiction, including the role of libraries, booksellers and periodicals in shaping transitional events in the history of the novel.

Our third tendency, the cultural history of fiction, views the novel as a dynamic event within culture, concentrating not on its internal development but on its wider historical influence, power and effects. How has the spread of novel-reading changed the ways in which people think, feel and conduct their lives? What is the social and political impact of the so-called ‘fiction industry’? What do novels do in the cultures in which they are read and how might they translate conflicts within them? It is much easier to answer these questions in relation to certain individual novels – consider the influence of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), or the continuing presence on British politics of Disraeli’s Sybil (1847) – than it is for the novel-form more widely. Of our three tendencies in the historiography of the novel this is the most recent and, perhaps, the most controversial.

One thing that unites our three tendencies is the need to address the problem of the novel’s origins. Literary, material and cultural historians have sometimes conspired to suggest that novels cannot have existed at all until a particular historical moment, usually the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe; yet the record shows that, in small numbers, novels or something very like them were known to a number of earlier civilisations. To use the terminology of the cultural historian Raymond Williams, the novel in, say, Elizabethan England was not yet a ‘dominant’ form; it is not even clear to what extent it might be considered ‘emergent’. Although printed books were already in circulation, the material infrastructure for the production and consumption of novels barely existed. The names of the Elizabethan novelists – Deloney, Gascoigne, Nashe and others – remain unknown to the majority of today’s English Literature students. Moreover, to discuss this (or any earlier) period in terms of strictly literary history is to enter what seems an interminable debate about the precise dividing line between the novel and the prose romance.

The emergence of this dividing line, together with the ever-increasing familiarity of the term ‘novel’, can be traced through an examination of late eighteenth-century English accounts of prose fiction, which frequently include a sketch of its history; a major example is Fanny Burney’s preface to Evelina (1778).³ A work such as John Colin Dunlop’s three-volume History of Fiction (1816) offers a seamless account of prose fiction from – to quote its subtitle – ‘the earliest Greek romances to the novels of the present age’. By the later nineteenth century, however, standard literary histories of the English novel were being written in response to its inclusion in the academic curriculum in Britain and the United States. Sidney Lanier’s The English Novel (1883) was compiled posthumously from the author’s lecture notes; David Masson published British Novelists and Their Styles (1859) while a professor of English Literature at University College London; Walter Raleigh’s The English Novel (1894) was dedicated to his students at Liverpool; Wilbur L. Cross’s The Development of the English Novel (1899) arose from classes at Yale; and George Saintsbury published The English Novel (1913) during his tenure of the chair at Edinburgh. These pedagogic histories offer varying amounts of historical explanation of the novel-form. Saintsbury, a prolific scholar also known for his histories of criticism and the French novel, was prodigiously widely read but offers little more than critical assessments of large numbers of authors and their works arranged in chronological order. Raleigh is a more genuinely historical thinker, concerned with marking the novel’s beginnings, its ‘rise’ (in fact, a double rise, first in the Elizabethan period and later in the 1740s), and its subsequent inflation to ‘giant’ proportions: he closes with the advent of Walter Scott, ‘the first of the modern race of giants in fiction’.⁴ The organic model for understanding the history of the novel (birth, infancy, development, maturity) was firmly established in Raleigh’s work, if not earlier. Some decades later the ground sketched out by these academic historians was painstakingly and impressively mapped in full by Ernest A. Baker in his multi-volume History of the English Novel (1924–39). At the same time, the arrival of the New Criticism signified a growing impatience with the apparently indiscriminate methods of earlier literary historians. Most influentially, F. R. Leavis in The Great Tradition (1948) settled on ‘tradition’ rather than ‘history’, using fiercely evaluative criteria ‘to insist on the pre-eminent few’ partly in order to cut through ‘all of the names in the literary histories’.⁵

This changed, however, with the irruption of a strongly materialist and culturalist approach to the history of the form in Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (1957). Watt, who began researching into eighteenth-century fiction at Cambridge in the late 1930s, had absorbed the impacts of the New Criticism and the Marxist historiography of culture. His central thesis was that the novel necessarily arose at a particular time and place (early eighteenth-century England) because of an unprecedented conjuncture of social, intellectual and economic conditions. Moreover, it served as an outlet for new kinds of experience which were more widespread in the most advanced and literate nations of early capitalist Europe than in any previous society. The framework for this approach is set out in three of Watt’s ten chapters, ‘Realism and the Novel Form’, ‘The Reading Public and the Rise of the Novel’, and ‘Private Experience and the Novel’. Here he discusses the history of realism as a philosophical concept and then presents a wealth of empirical evidence about such matters as book sales, the influence of urbanization, the spread of literacy, the rise of circulating libraries, the pricing of novels, the labour-saving effects of early industrialization, and the availability of leisure time, especially for women who formed a large proportion of early novel-readers. Developments in fictional technique are related directly to the needs of a new middle-class public avid for literary entertainment, a public which had never existed before. At the same time, Watt defines the novel in terms of its ‘formal realism’, dismissing from consideration all modes of prose fiction before the eighteenth century on the grounds that they were insufficiently realistic. Drawing on earlier Marxist works such as Ralph Fox’s The Novel and the People (1937), The Rise of the Novel reinforces the much-debated but affecting explanation of the novel’s emergence in terms of the spread of individualism, the development of capitalism and the triumph of bourgeois culture: the novel seen as the representative art form of the modern period, or ‘modernity’ itself. Watt’s book is powerfully argued and intellectually challenging as no previous history of the English novel had been, and it remains strongly influential more than half a century after its first publication.

In terms of literary history, Watt’s organic model of the novel’s rise to ‘full maturity’ (which for him comes with Jane Austen) is, as we have seen, by no means original.⁶ His stress on ‘formal realism’, for example, should be compared with the title of the fourth volume of Ernest A. Baker’s history, Intellectual Realism: from Richardson to Sterne, which had been published in 1930. His understanding of realism was also much influenced by Erich Auerbach’s vast study, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1953) which Watt read in the original German (published 1946) after being demobilised at the end of the Second World War.⁷ Watt himself frequently quotes from Madame de Staël, and acknowledges the pioneering contribution of her De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (1800).

Another manifest influence on Watt’s work was Q. D. Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public (1932), which had charted the relationship between the Puritan conscience and ‘The Growth of the Reading Public’ in one of its chapters. Leavis’s study has been described by John Sutherland as ‘the first serious work of literary sociology to be published in English’.⁸ Watt clearly drew on these sociological methods for his chapter on ‘The Reading Public and the Rise of the Novel’ as, too, did Richard D. Altick whose book The English Common Reader appeared in the same year as The Rise of the Novel. Altick read Watt’s book in proof and the background to his empirical study of the ‘Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800–1900’ extends Watt’s thesis by demonstrating the centrality of the novel to the history of literacy and reading: the novel – the ‘chief stock in trade’ of the new circulating libraries – was the literary form which, more than any other, ‘helped democratize reading in the eighteenth century.’⁹ It is significant that fiction forms the lengthiest category in Altick’s appendix of nineteenth-century ‘Best-Sellers’.

Watt’s subsequent influence is shown by the extent to which later historians of fiction have concentrated on revising, extending or questioning his account of the novel’s ‘rise’ in the eighteenth century. The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century novelists, while studied by specialists, are routinely left out of the modern equivalents of Raleigh’s and Lanier’s histories of the English novel written for their students. Studies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century English fiction – even those heavily committed to historicising and contextualising the works they discuss – have generally been presented as contributions to literary criticism rather than literary history. Academic literary histories continue to be written – as witness Malcolm Bradbury’s The Modern British Novel (1993) and many others – but in recent decades the significant conceptual innovations in the history of fiction since 1800 have moved well beyond the home-grown ‘English novel’, as will be seen below.

A number of works explicitly addressing Watt’s thesis demand to be noted. Jane Spencer’s The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (1986) is one of several examples of feminist scholarship challenging Watt’s all-male pantheon of Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, and highlighting the role that women (as writers and readers) played in the novel’s origins and development.¹⁰ Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (1987) argues that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction written by and for women produced a sense of English middle-class identity, sexuality and political power. Her work forms part of the cultural trend in recent novel studies which has sought to understand ‘how novels produce social divisions: from what a novel is to what novels do’.¹¹ Lennard J. Davis’s Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (1983) and J. Paul Hunter’s Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (1990) relate the development of English fiction to the material and discursive contexts of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century society including journalism, diaries and didactic pamphlets. Michael McKeon’s The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (1988) remains strongly committed to a materialist reading of the novel’s origins, but questions Watt’s timeline and his exclusion of seventeenth-century novels and romances. Leah Price, in The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel (2000), extends the material aspects of Watt’s thesis and challenges his conclusions about the extent to which the novel levelled ‘class and gender distinctions’.¹² Her study is an important reminder that the history of the novel is inextricably bound up with the history of the book – that novels reach their readers in a variety of material forms, and writers, publishers and editors shape fiction according to those forms and their perceived audience.

In recent years, both Watt’s sociological thesis and the historical-geographical framework of The Rise of the Novel have been fundamentally challenged by a revival of the literary approach to genre history that is transnational and multilingual in focus and influenced by world-systems theory. For example, Margaret Ann Doody’s The True Story of the Nov...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Notes On the Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• Part I The Material Text
• Part II Literary Histories: Questions of Realism and Form
• Part III The Novel in National and Transnational Cultures
• Part IV The Novel Now