Reconsidering Origins: How Novel Are Theories of the Novel?
Lennard J. Davis, Binghamton University
Volume 12, no. 2-3, January-April 2000
©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
At a recent conference on the future of the novel, Terry Castle hurled a Jovian lightning bolt at theories of the early novel: “I feel we have reached a saturation-point currently in academic studies of eighteenth-century fiction — at least in those studies that bear on the history of the genre qua genre. While vast gains have been made — and I truly think the genealogical, historical and bibliographic work done on the early English novel over the past twenty years is one of the great triumphs of twentieth-century literary criticism — we also have reached a kind of intellectual dead end, and like exhausted little Lovelaces with word processors can go no further.” Castle’s point was that all the really essential work on the genre of the eighteenth-century novel had been done. … As the final declamation whizzed by, one could feel a pain that spread through the audience, mainly the pain of graduate students, in the room. Their feeling, expressed later ex camera, was that such a pronouncement was premature, as each of them imagined contributing more to an analysis of the rise of the novel rather than attending its wake. Castle’s assessment may or may not be true, but, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, all of us are calendrically obliged to take stock of the work done on the novel and in novel theory, and to decide, in Lenin’s favourite phrase, “what is to be done?” if there is anything more to be done.
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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