What does Eagleton's statement about the novel fostering resistance to authority mean?
"The novel fostered a resistance to authority at the very time that it was becoming a resourceful medium of middle-class cultural power" (20).
Terry Eagleton’s “What is a Novel?” is the first part of his 1983 book Literary Theory: An Introduction, which is recognized as a landmark text in literary studies. The essay acknowledges the basic formal features of novels—it begins with the fairly obvious point that “A novel is a piece of prose fiction of reasonable length” (1). Yet Eagleton is not merely interested in points like these but rather in the social and cultural significance of the novel as a genre, part of which is suggested by the quote you have selected.
In this quote, Eagleton is referring to a particular type of novel—the kind of realist novel that dominated literature in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. He has in mind works like Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and George Eliot’s Middlemarch. According to Eagleton, one of the things that makes the realist novel so special is the...
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way it concentrates on matters of everyday life and, in doing so, is relatable to the average (middle class person). As Eagleton writes:
[A]rt finally returned the world to the common people who had created it through their labour, and who could now contemplate their own faces in it for the first time. A form of fiction had been born in which one could be proficient without specialist erudition or an expensive classical education. As such, it was especially available to groups like women, who had been cheated of such an education and shut out from such expertise. (19–20)
Earlier works recognized as having literary significance often required specialized education and knowledge to access and appreciate—think of the works of ancient Greek and Roman literature that were important to an educated person of the eighteenth and nineteenth century and were not always available in translation. By presenting a realistic, relatable world in common language, the realist novel subverted this class restriction on literature; as Eagleton writes, it “fostered a resistance to authority” while “becoming a resourceful medium of middle-class cultural power” (20).
Eagleton also asserts that this power was especially significant for women at the time, who were typically unable to access the education (and thus the literary world) available to men of their same class level. He believes that women were especially adept at understanding the kind of social world depicted in the realist novel and so were particularly successful as both readers and authors.
What does Eagleton mean in his essay "What is a Novel?" when he says the novel both resisted and upheld authority?
"The novel fostered a resistance to authority at the very time that it was becoming a resourceful medium of middle-class cultural power" (20).
This statement comes a few paragraphs from the end of Eagleton's essay, when he has been pointing out what an endlessly diverse form the novel is and how difficult it is to define as a form (which is why there are endless candidates for the position of "first novel" in the world, and in the literature of every country).
The essay discusses the unusually large role of women in writing novels, suggesting that the finely detailed observation of a Jane Austen or a George Eliot was produced by women's need to understand a potentially hostile world dominated by men. Eagleton says of such female novelists:
They were spontaneous semioticians, who needed for their own sake to be skilled in deciphering signs of power, symptoms of dissent, and fruitful or dangerous areas of ambiguity. All this lent itself to the writing of fiction, even if the same set of talents lends itself to being a successful tyrant.
It is in this context that Eagleton introduces his paradox that "the novel fostered a resistance to authority at the very time that it was becoming a resourceful medium of middle-class cultural power." The skills of a fiction-writer are the skills of a tyrant in the same sense that the fiction she writes both resists and reinforces authority.
The novel, Eagleton contends, "became the supreme arbitrator, in the sphere of cultural representations, of what was to count as real in the first place." In this sense, what was not represented in novels was as important as what was there. The novel allowed and even encouraged social criticism, but first it defined, perhaps quite narrowly, the society that was available to be criticized. This is how it came to embrace subversion and authority at the same time.