Some notes on the rise of the novel via essays by Richetti and Warner

The Columbia History of the British Novel.  Ed. John Richetti. 

“Introduction”—John Richetti. 
Novel regarded as distinctly modern literary form: D.H. Lawrence felt the novel could vitally present unique, individual life; Lukåcs believed it recorded emptiness/alienation; M. Bakhtin argued that the novel form embodied revolutionary, liberating linguistic energies (x).

Bakhtin: novel distinct because it renders a dynamic present of competing, discordant, multiple voices (heteroglossia) that are always “dialogical”—incessant shaping of reality through rival forms of language that occurs among competing social groups—the novel registers the expressive relativizing of language (xi).

Richetti states that novels, as modern, promote and mimic individualism, represent the frequent clash between individuals and society, and imply a universe in development (akin to an incomplete Judeo-Christian world in contrast to a view of the world as complete, such as in Islam), particularly in a Western secular and psychological context.

Much in dispute about the origins of the novel and how to distinguish it from long narratives in verse, from classical epic, medieval romance.  Moreover, is the novel an instrument of moral and historical knowledge or a subtle means for repression and naturalization and regulation in the service of those who wield cultural power and economic priviledge? (xiii).  Or are novelists artistic visionaries who render social and historical relations with a fullness that allows readers to understand the world?

Some argue that the British novel begins as a profoundly female form written by women for core audience of women, with emphasis on representing domestic life and the interior lives of characters, in contrast to traditional literature of masculine heroism in public life.  Some feminist critics argue that the novel articulates a consciousness whose sensitivity and self-awareness are recognized as feminine (xiv). 

In its emphases on complex local networks and identities, the early British novel helps to create a national personality of eccentric distinctiveness and personal expressiveness: “That is to say, in its attention to radical particularlity the early British novel records the characteristic stresses and strains of the momentous transition from traditional hierarchical modes of life to those rationalized and regularized forms of social organization that characterize the modern nation-state.  As it develops in the early eighteenth century in Britain, realistic narrative comes to involve the ventriloquizing of particular individuals who by definition do not fit neatly into didactic or general categories” (xv). 

Richetti states that the British novel focuses upon blurring of status divisions in depicting and dramatizing the “emergence of recognizably modern kinds of individuality wherein persons acquire worth, status, or power either by luck, by redefined and expanded economic opportunity, or by the exercise of extraordinary moral virtue” (xvi).

Jane Austen defended novelistic fiction as “only some work in which the greatest powers of mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.”  More recently Frank Kermode defended the form as perhaps the “best available instrument of ethical inquiry; that its own extraordinary variety of means equips it as our best recorder of human variety. . . “

“Always in crisis and seemingly aware of its own fragility and moral and cultural ambiguity, the novel has been since its beginnings more of an occasion for modern narration to question its own purposes than a stable narrative institution.  Paradoxically, that instability seems to be the essence of the novel’s strength and endurance . . .” (xviii).  “By shaping imaginary lives, the novel may thus illuminate what a culture most desires and fears.  In reading a novel we can hear, as Bakhtin would say, the dialogue among competing versions of truth that is the novel’s uniquely dynamic version of truth itself” (xix).

Richetti, John.  “Introduction.”  The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel.  Cambridge UP, 1996. 

Novel as a literary term only stabilizes by early nineteenth century—early terms include romance, history, true history, and secret history—early eighteenth century discourse blurs fact and fiction and gradually the novel develops by/after mid-century defining itself in rejection, modification, and transformation of prior storytelling practices to delimit instead a narrower “realistic” novel even as subtypes such as the amatory novella, the sentimental, and the Gothic novel record a protest against a rationalistic preference of the actual and the historical. 

One major strain follows Cervantes’ Don Quixote’s local/historical realism set against traditional romance and epic (via Quixote’s delusional adherence to such romance conventions that both support realism and still admire romance idealism).  In general, the supernatural and marvelous are banished in favor of ordinary as experienced by a newly conceptualized modern individual whose particularized and personal view is explored as if it were somehow prior to a communal or social world (5), and as if reality were constructed by particular minds and wills (such as Don Quixotes’s).  Or put differently, an objective world yields to the “insistently differing subjective perspectives of strong and creative individuals” though novels also feature the deflation of individual perspectives by social norms or by the brute factual force of the physical world.

Market for secular books, for ‘news’ of the details of everyday life, grows gradually with publishing industry (cf primacy of present sensory experience to Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690)

Growth of urban centers, esp. London, including middling ranks of society and attempts to acquire status/wealth through action/virtue rather than inheritance
Financial revolution shifts value away from real property to other instruments of commercial exchange—status for sale and identity subject to the fluctuations of the market
Middle class myth of personal possibility and individual growth/achievement, also critique of possessive individualism
Central persistent theme is debate about the novel itself

Warner, William.  “Licensing Pleasure: Literary History and the Novel in Early Modern Britain.”  The Columbia History of the Novel

Early eighteenth century saw anti-novel campaign targeting romances, Continental novellas, and fictions and secret histories by Behn, Manley, and Haywood.  See Samuel Johnson’s 1750 Rambler No. 4 on Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett, and others.  Johnson warned that such works as Clarissa and Tom Jones produced powerful identifications in their readers, and that only the best novels should be read because of potential moral effects.  Clara Reeves’s The Progress of Romance (1785), a literary history in dialogue form, features woman scholar Euphrasia and a high-culture snob Hortensius.  Hortensius critiques novels for creating and catering to depraved appetites, for sowing seeds of vice and false expectations (“A young woman is taught to expect adventures and intrigues. . . . If a plain man addresses her in rational terms . . . that is not sufficient . . . she expects to meet a Hero in Romance.”—and novels induce a dangerous autonomy from parents and guardians (“young people believe themselves wiser than parents and guardians, whom they treat with contempt and ridicule”). 

Warner states that Richardson and Fielding accept much of these critiques, and developed “replacement fictions as a cure for the novel-addicted reader.  In doing so, they aimed to deflect and reform, improve and justify the pleasures of a new species of elevated novel” (3).

With censorship subsiding, novels began to appear by upstart authors apparently pandering to any desire that would produce a sale—part of a culture of serial entertainments that bred imitation and were seemingly oblivious to moral effects.  Francis Coventry: “It is very certain, that whenever any thing new, of what kind soever, is started by one man, and appears with great success in the world, it quickly produces several in the same taste.”  Warner: “An uncontrolled multiplicity threatens to metastasize culture” (5)—producing a market-driven need to read.  As Reeve notes, Richardson and Fielding aimed to write antidotes; Richardson stated “Instruction, Madam, is the Pill; Amusement is the Gilding. Writings that do not touch the Passions of the Light and Airy, will hardly ever reach the heart.” 

Warner: “The incorporation of the novel of amorous intrigue within the elevated novel of the 1740s is one of the means by which old pleasures are disowned and effaced. . . . novelists like Richardson and Fielding promote this forgetting, first by defacing the novel of amorous intrigue and then by providing their own novels as replacements for the novels they characterize as degraded and immoral” (14). 

“The pejorative terms applied to romance (fanciful, wishful, out of touch with reality, etc.) are also applied to women.  The favorable terms applied to novels (realistic, rational, improving) are congruent with those that describe the male as a politically responsible member of the public sphere” (16).

“Like a museum, literary history turns the strife of history into a repertoire of forms.  It does so by taking differences that may have motivated the writing or reading of novels within specific historical contexts—differences of religion, politics, class, social propriety, or ethical design, to name a few—and converts them into differences of kind” (18, e.g. Richardson novel of psychology and sentiment vs. Fielding novel of social panorama and critique).  Over course of 18-19th centuries novel, as understood in literary history, becomes identified and classified by its nationalism, its realism, and its power to express a personal interiority.