[In this excerpt Fitzgerald discusses the nature of the novel and its relationships to other genres.]

Novels of the late eighteenth century have, until recently, been largely ignored by twentieth-century scholars and critics. In the traditional view of the history of the novel that I learned as an undergraduate, there were the "Big Four" novelists—Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, and Smollett—who "invented" the British novel in a remarkably short period of time. Daniel Defoe and Oliver Goldsmith merited some attention for Moll Flanders, Robinson Crusoe, and The Vicar of Wakefield; they might therefore be regarded as alternate members of the "Big Four" Club. Then, nothing of note seemed to have happened until Jane Austen's novels miraculously appeared on the scene in the early nineteenth century. Although there were certainly some interesting blips on the literary seismograph—Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho, in particular, and also perhaps Godwin's Caleb Williams, MacKenzie's Man of Feeling, and Burney's Evelina, novels published between 1770 and 1811 (the year Sense and Sensibility appeared) received very little critical or scholarly attention. If a student wanted to delve a bit more deeply into this period in novel history—in order to prepare for preliminary examinations for a doctoral degree in eighteenth-century British literature, for example—she resorted to the categories supplied by the few literary historians who had bothered to discuss late eighteenth-century novels: the Gothic novel (Castle of Otranto, The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Monk, Vathek); the sentimental novel (The Man of Feeling, The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Biddulph); the doctrinaire, philosophical or Jacobin novel (Anna St. Ives, Nature and Art, Caleb Williams, Hermsprong). Each "type" was viewed to be of some historical interest because of the authors' willingness to experiment with unusual content or stylistic innovations of various kinds. The main point, however, was to set these novels apart, into convenient categories, as a way of isolating what was new about them rather than in an attempt to incorporate them into the mainstream tradition of the novel. We used to assume that almost no one (and certainly no intelligent, well educated people) read those novels, even at the time they were published; they were, according to received opinion, amateurish, sloppy, primitive, and embarrassingly inept. Their badness at least could provide the sophisticated modern reader with a laugh or two. Because we concluded, from our superior vantage point, that these were bad novels, we assumed also that the next wave of "great" novelists—Austen, Dickens, and Eliot—probably dismissed them as well. Austen and Dickens couldn't possibly have learned anything from writers like Robert Bage and Charlotte Smith.

Recently, our understanding of the eighteenth-century novel has changed dramatically. The hegemony of the "Big Four" is being reexamined, and novelists who worked before and after them are getting fresh readings. Even so, as J. Paul Hunter observes in Before Novels, the formalist mind set is hard to shake:

Traditional novelistic theory, based as it is on analogies with more traditional and more conservative literary forms and the structures that support them, does not like to hear the multiple discourses in novels or recognize the presence of competing modes within individual works. Recent narrative theory has been more receptive to odd, lumpy, and unexpected features, but most criticism of novels retains its arriviste snootiness, remaining intolerant of features that do not meet preconceived standards. Definitions remain high-minded, novels recalcitrant. (29) …

Genre Theory and Realism

By stressing that formal realism is just one mode of representation available to the novelist, genre theory provides an approach for revising our understanding of the late eighteenth-century novel, especially novels that encompass a broad panorama of genres and styles. Genre theorists have discussed the fluid quality of the novel, its elusive structural principles, and its incorporation of many different genres. Ralph Cohen argues, in rebuttal of the idea that eighteenth-century writers and critics were guided by a rigid code of decorum and rules, that writers freely explored the possibilities inherent in the interrelationships of genre, particularly with regard to the didactic function of literature, which, since the Renaissance, had gradually become elevated in importance ("On the Interrelations of Eighteenth-Century Literary Forms" 76-77). More recently, Cohen has stated that genre theory can provide "the most effective procedure for dealing with change in literary history … We need a new literary history, and I believe that genre theory can provide it" ("Genre Theory" 113).

Cohen's statement that referential and nonreferential truth can coexist in a given literary work is compatible with recent critical reassessments of the notion of realism by Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, Taylor Stoehr, Paul Coates, and Robert Alter. Robert Alter has noted that there are two types of mimetic procedure for the novel: realism, in which the novelist seeks to maintain a relatively consistent illusion of reality, in that what is written refers exactly to some phenomenon of the real world; and a self-conscious approach that "systematically flaunts its own necessary condition of artifice, pointing at the relationship between art and reality" (13). Alter observes further that the relationships between novels and the world are far more complex than "the sturdy moral realism of Anglo-American novel criticism, from James to Leavis to Ian Watt" (21). Roland Barthes takes this view even further by suggesting that no truth is referential in literature, that what we have instead is the "referential illusion" (148).

Ian Watt would certainly agree with Alter's view that early critics of the novel failed to grasp the complexity of realism. In "Serious Reflections on The Rise of the Novel," Watt wrote that his concept that "realism of presentation" and "realism of assessment" could be separated was far too simplistic, for "some form of evaluation is always inextricably connected with any writer's presentation" (214). Watt also mentions a second problem with his definition of realism in The Rise of the Novel: in assuming that the novel rose in opposition to the traditional social and literary establishment of the time, he overlooked the ways in which the novel was a conservative didactic tool, based on a world view primarily "Augustan," which is "an elite outlook based on the defense of a civilized social order." Although the major eighteenth-century novelists, along with Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott, criticized society, they did so in "ways and accents which suggest that the Augustan norms seemed to them to have universal validity, and these norms surely encouraged some of the special literary features which their novels had in common" (216). Watt concludes that this "Augustan" world view tended to emphasize "masculine" and "adult" rather than "feminine" and "adolescent" values; the feminine and the adolescent point of view was to receive greater attention later in the history of the novel. (We might squirm today at this linking of "feminine and adolescent"; however, Watt's implicit allusion to novels by women in his reassessment of The Rise of the Novel should be taken as a positive gesture). Watt's observations provide a useful introduction to my approach to late eighteenth-century novels, for many of them do explore the experiences of young people, particularly with regard to the selection of marriage partners and the question of the individual's obligation to his or her family. However, what Watt identifies as "feminine and adolescent values" in these novels might more precisely be described as an interest in the individual personality (both feminine and masculine) and the conflict between private desires and public expectations in the face of the gradual erosion of the family's power over the individual.

Many critics have analyzed the late-eighteenth-century novel's emphasis on feminine experience. Nancy Armstrong's Desire and Domestic Fiction traces the novel's "rise" by suggesting that the novel helped to create the domestic model for feminine experience. The novel rose not so much to chronicle middle-class experience, but to bring about a change in the way people perceived the individual's role in society: "Thus, what began chiefly as writing that situated the individual within the poles of nature and culture, self and society, sex and sexuality, only later became a psychological reality, and not the other way around" (13). Oddly, as Robert Folkenflik has observed, Armstrong spends little time discussing the works of eighteenth-century women writers, choosing to anchor her analysis of the formulation of domestic fiction on Richardson's Pamela (211). Important studies of eighteenth-century women writers abound, including those by Janet Todd, Jane Spencer, Dale Spender, Katherine Sobba Green, Mary Poovey, Elizabeth Bergen Brophy, and Mona Scheuermann.

Women's experiences are extremely important themes, but at the same time they are embedded in the changing condition of the family as a whole as depicted in novels at the end of the eighteenth century. Young men like Mortimer Delvile in Cecilia and Orlando Somerive in The Old Manor House are also severely affected by changes in their families' social and economic status. Many late eighteenth-century novels explore conflicts between individual desires and the expectations of the older generation and society in general. These conflicts are resolved, but at great cost to individual young women and young men. In such novels, therefore, the young person's ultimate integration into the accepted social structure is viewed as problematic; in contrast to the situation of Tom Jones or John Moore's Edward Evilen, social integration is not entirely a blessing for characters like Cecilia Beverley and Orlando Somerive. Their problem is not to learn to obey the rules of social conduct, but rather how to survive in a society that limits individuals because of conventional expectations that they marry certain people and not others, and get and spend money only in certain ways.•

M. M. Bakhtin has suggested that the novel represents reality through the interplay of the many points of view embedded in a group of genres; there is no central, identifiable novel structure, and the "novel" is simply a loose shell surrounding a combination of components derived from different genres (321). This observation is particularly germane to many eighteenth-century novels, with their emphasis on epistemological investigations of the world in order to arrive at a didactic message, a feature that today's readers find difficult to appreciate. The vehicle for didacticism is the speech and action of the characters, or more specifically, in Bakhtin's analysis, the dialogue between the speeches and actions of all the characters, a dialogue based on allusions to many different genres. Thus, the dialogue between the real world and the artificial world of the novel, and between realistic and self-conscious representation within the novel itself, is re-enacted within the speech and actions of individual characters.

In some eighteenth-century novels, the freewheeling mixture of genres results in structural arrangements that defy the modern reader, conditioned to expect a linear sequence of events placed in a continuous temporal framework. Temporal logic, the foundation of formal realism, is a radical departure from earlier literature; as Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth observes, "The Morte d'Arthur or the Song of Roland baffles modern readers, who assume that a narrative of events is a temporal sequence without realizing that there are other kinds of sequence, such as rhetorical ones" (8). Modern readers are similarly unable to perceive the structural logic of eighteenth-century novels.

One rhetorical arrangement that is possible in the eighteenth-century novel, as Eric Rothstein has shown, is based on systems of analogical relationships. The characters are linked, not by a series of plausibly motivated actions, but by virtue of their respective positions with regard to a primary epistemological problem. Even characters who are introduced into a novel by the flimsiest imaginable threads of plot participate in the central epistemological pattern. Rothstein's term "positional," based on Roman Jakobson's description of metonymy, is also useful in describing this analogical tendency in eighteenth-century novels. Although he uses the term to define the style of eighteenth-century poetry, Rothstein states that a similar process is at work in the novel. Positional style is

the linguistic placing of an object within a context. The context may be something more comprehensive than the object (table: furniture, house), another member of the same group (table: chair), or something connected to the object by nature or logic (table: banquet). Jakobson opposes metonymy, in his expanded sense of "positioning faculty" or "contextual focus," to metaphor, which governs relationships of similarity and identity. He postulates that the mental functions typical of "metonymy" and "metaphor" are fundamental to the way we comprehend the world: the essence of individual objects ("metaphor") on the one hand, the contextual classifications for those objects ("metonymy") on the other. (Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Poetry 49-50)

"Positional style" requires readers to compare and contrast sets of characters and ideas with one another, even though individual scenes of the novel vary widely in tone and content. Just as readers arrange individual images in a poem within a context, proficient readers of eighteenth-century novels arrange and rearrange individual scenes, which can be described as self-contained chunks of novel material—the allusive fragments and predictable formulas from a broad range of genres that are woven again and again into novels of this period. The individual scene is meant to call up associations in the reader's mind, suggesting a general observation about the human condition that the particular moment in the novel typifies. The resulting novelistic world, created of allusions to a variety of literary genres and completed by the reader's experience and imaginative participation, may be more "realistic" than the much tidier worlds of linearly plotted novels.…

Philosophy, History, and Romance

A novel is not only a composite of fictional and nonfictional literary sources and various levels of self-consciousness or realism, but also, in Avrom Fleishman's words, "the supplement of historical and philosophical writing," with the result that "one cannot glory in its uniqueness without frequent forays into other ways of knowing and writing the world" (22). Michael McKeon would agree with this statement, for he amends Bakhtin's analysis of the discourse of genre by noting that it "accounts for only one of the two major postures whose interaction constitutes the epistemological origins of the novel" (118). Bakhtin, according to McKeon, neglects to take into account the novel's engagement with "naive empiricism" or questions of truth; he sees only the literary influences on the novel, when a dialogue between history and various literary genres is actually in effect. McKeon argues that the novel emerged in the Restoration and early eighteenth century from a dialectic between romance and history, a dialectic that is not a conflict between the demands of the two forms, but rather an interpenetration of the two.

The empiricism of "true history" opposes the discredited idealism of romance, but it thereby generates a countervailing, extreme skepticism, which in turn discredits true history as a species of naive empiricism or "new romance." Once in motion, however, the sequence of action and reaction becomes a cycle: the existence of each opposed stance becomes essential for the ongoing negative definition of its antithesis. (88)

In McKeon's paradigm for the development of the eighteenth-century novel, romance casts doubt on history, even ridicules it; history's attempt to get at the "truth" of events undermines the imaginative world of romance. Both endeavors are undermined by skepticism, and the novel keeps working through these cycles over and over again.

McKeon also views the novel as a manifestation of what he terms the crisis in status consistency, the war between the classes, enacted in a dialectic between virtue as an inherited characteristic of the aristocrat, and virtue as an innate quality of the lower and middle classes, earning them upward mobility. The persistence of aristocratic romance forms in the portrayal of the lives of aristocratic characters in novels of the early eighteenth century is therefore not a "problem" with the eighteenth-century novel, but rather a vital component in its development:

For the traditional categories do not really "persist" into the realm of the modern as an alien intrusion from without. Now truly abstracted and constituted as categories, they are incorporated within the very process of the emergent genre and are vitally functional in the finely articulated mechanism by which it establishes its own domain. (21)

In McKeon's view, the novel grew out of the revolutionary clash in early modern England between "status and class orientations and the attendant crisis in status inconsistency" (173-174). McKeon describes two competing ideologies: progressive ideology laments the social injustice of aristocratic rule, which equates hereditary power and status with virtue; conservative ideology, while agreeing that the aristocracy commits injustices, at the same time fears that a "'new aristocracy' of the undeserving," presumably based only on wealth, might be just as likely to commit and condone social injustice as the old aristocracy (174).

McKeon concentrates on the history of the novel up to the mid eighteenth-century, but his discussion of the social conflicts that were enacted in the dialectic between romance and history has direct applications to the late eighteenth-century novel as well. McKeon identifies two important eighteenth-century novel plots: stories of disinherited younger sons, and stories of conflicts between aristocratic seducers and lower or middle-class women. Both of these plots are tied to questions of how wealth and status are transferred to young people within a society that assumes that individuals who already possess money and power are more deserving of additional rewards than those who possess virtue and integrity only. The two plots that McKeon discusses in detail are certainly prominent in the mid eighteenth century, but other plots become important later in the century. Two examples would be stories of young women who attempt to establish themselves in society by managing their inheritances independently of the wishes of a guardian or spouse and stories of deserving but poor young men who attempt to survive financially and socially on the basis of their virtue and ability (these young men were never disinherited because they never had anything to inherit in the first place). The five novels in my study are all versions of the romance plot of young people assuming their proper places in society through suitable marriages or the acquisition of inherited wealth, or both. Nor are McKeon's questions of truth and virtue the only issues raised in the plots of these novels. Attention is also directed to questions about the role of the family in influencing an individual's decision to marry or not to marry a particular partner, with greater value placed on marriage for affection than marriage for economic convenience. The place of women in society is also considered, particularly in Cecilia and Mount Henneth, often as part of a more general question about the degree to which individual happiness is contingent upon conformity to social expectations. Stories of outsiders, persons like Schedoni in The Italian or Mr. Albany in Cecilia, who defy social expectations to either good or evil effect, are sometimes introduced as extreme versions of this theme.

McKeon's study, while extremely valuable, is necessarily selective in its scope. The interplay of genres in the novel is much more riotous and haphazard than McKeon's carefully controlled paradigm allows. The tension between romance and history is just one dialectic in the complicated blend of generic voices that produced novels in the early eighteenth century, and continues to produce them, as evidenced by Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, an amazing compendium of genres, including, among many other components, a computer manual, a history of the Knights Templars, and a reference guide to the occult. Our awareness of the many different genres incorporated into the early English novel is expanding at a rapid pace. Lennard Davis' Factual Fictions, an examination of the novel's relationship to the newspaper, is an early study of the novel's ability to absorb other types of prose writing. J. Paul Hunter's Before Novels is an excellent introduction to the eighteenth-century novel, and provides a thorough discussion of the most important genres that contributed to its development. More recently, Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse have suggested that American captivity narratives were a source for Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa. Other critics have begun to explore the relationship between the novel and writing about science and natural history; valuable studies have been published by Robert James Merrett, Serge Soupel, and Ann Jessie Van Sant.…