Flat-Footed and Fly-Blown: The Realities of Realism
Ian Watt, Stanford 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
I am, of course, immensely flattered to be invited here, and for many reasons. As Horace Walpole said about the unexpected success of The Castle of Otranto, “It is charming to totter into vogue.” It is particularly charming because it lends credibility to the hypothesis of my continuing survival, which is not universally accepted: not long ago I fell into conversation with a student at Berkeley, and when, on parting, I told him my name, he answered with genuine astonishment: “Oh, I thought you were dead.” A third reason, no doubt, is that I cannot claim to be wholly a stranger to what Johnson said about Richardson: that he “could not be content to sail quietly down the stream of reputation without longing to taste the froth from every stroke of the oar.” My original difficulty in deciding whether to come and, if so, what to talk about arose partly from a sense of decorum which told me that I should not be observed visibly to agitate the stream of reputation myself; and yet this is what Paul Hunter in effect has asked me to do. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that I don’t want to repeat an earlier solicited transgression in the self-congratulation line, an essay called “Serious Reflections on The Rise of the Novel.”
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Realism” include:
Natural History and Narrative Sympathy: The Children’s Animal Stories of Edward Augustus Kendall (1775/6?–1842)
by JANE SPENCER (ECF 25.4, Summer 2013)
Real Robinson Crusoe
by MICHAEL GAVIN (ECF 25.2, Winter 2012-13)
How to Portray a Trade? Identity and Interpretation in Johan Zoffany’s An Optician with His Attendant
by CRAIG ASHLEY HANSON (ECF 23.2, Winter 2010-11)
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