Rethinking Reading: The Novel and Cultural Stratification
William Ray, Reed College
Volume 10, no. 2, January 1998
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
In the course of the last decade or so we have come to think of the novel no longer just as a reflection or product of social and cultural reality, but as an active instrument in the construction of that reality. Critics as different as Michael McKeon and Nancy Armstrong have accustomed us to take for granted that early fiction played a central role in the articulation and management of subjectivity through the formations of selfhood, ethical regimes, and models of sociality it disseminated. Yet within this general rethinking of fiction as an agent of historical change, far less attention has been devoted to the ways in which it might have altered the practices of reading through which novels operate. A shift from “intensive” devotional reading to “extensive” literary reading has been proposed to account for the way in which reading evolved more generally; but few have questioned how the protocols and assumptions of fiction reading in particular might have changed in concert with the novel’s circulation of new models of the self. By and large we assume that eighteenth and nineteenth-century novels operate primarily by depicting behaviour with which readers identify. Fictional narratives amend and reconfigure subjectivity by providing characters the reader can imitate or sympathize with — or be repelled by.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Rise of the Novel” include:
The Empty Decade? English Fiction in the 1730s
by LACY MARSCHALK, MALLORY ANNE PORCH, & PAULA R. BACKSCHEIDER (ECF 26.3, Spring 2014)
Ideal Friendship and the Paradoxes of Narration in Sarah Fielding’s David Simple
by BRYAN MANGANO (ECF 26.2, Winter 2013-14)
Devotional Reading and Novel Form: The Case of David Simple
by TERA PATTELLA (ECF 24.2, Winter 2011-12)
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