Of Probability, Romance, and the Spatial Dimensions of Eighteenth-Century Narrative
Matthew Wickman, Brigham Young University
Volume 15, no. 1, October 2002
©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
Scholars have long considered it axiomatic that the eighteenth-century British novel bore a close but complex relation to the genre of romance. Whether one reads this relation as dialectical or complementary, and peruses novels for realism or entertainment, as news or as “nobody’s story,” the general consensus is that eighteenth-century novels established their legitimacy by invoking the spectre of romance as a form evocative of Britain’s past. Novelists could embrace or deny this heritage, but they often peddled their work as a product of modern tastes, whereas romance came to represent a primitive emblem of feudal society. This is what made the revival of romance in the form of Gothic fiction a powerful expression of desire and difference in the later eighteenth century. It also partly explains the popularity of Walter Scott’s novels, with their reification of history into spatial zones differentiating a modern British core from its romantic Celtic periphery. Scott’s literary maps effectively charted a course of social progress that also commented self-reflexively on the development of the novel as a genre.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “narrative” include:
I Will Unfold A Tale—!: Narrative, Epistemology, and Caleb Williams
by EMILY R. ANDERSON (ECF 22.1, Fall 2009)
Slipping from Secret History to Novel
by RACHEL CARNELL (ECF 28.1, Fall 2015)
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)
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