Modern Novel Writing in the Eighteenth Century: ‘Classic’ and Later Perspectives

Abstract

AbstractThis article provides a recapitulation of Ian Watt’s classic account of the rise of the novel in terms of the rise of the middle class which finds its ideological equivalent in the rise of formal realism. While this account has been frequently countered by revisionist approaches in a largely new historicist mode, which insist that the historical multifariousness of modern novel writing in the eighteenth century is not fully captured by Watt (Lennart J. Davis, Michael McKeon, J. Paul Hunter, Jane Spencer, Nancy Armstrong and Janet Todd in the 1980s, Marcie Frank, Jordan Alexander Stein and Mike Goode more recently), it has not really lost its persuasiveness to this day. As the article tries to show, this persuasiveness rests on the ideological implications of Watt’s account of early novelistic practice rather than its actual historical implementation. This diagnosis has recently been confirmed by Mike Goode’s approach to Sir Walter Scott’s and Jane Austen’s ‘synthesis’ of fully developed formal realism in terms of ‘media behaviors’ and their affordances. In the case of Jane Austen, for example, the fact that later media usage in fanfiction tends to turn to narrative techniques from before Austen’s synthesis (letters, journals, etc.) points to the (perceived) ideological limitations of her technical achievement of smooth assimilation of multiple points of view into a naturalized third-person narrator’s discourse. This opens up new perspectives on Smollett’s practice of unassimilated multiperspectivity, especially in his last novelThe Expedition of Humphry Clinker(1771).