The Rise of the Novel
Charles Knight

1. Historical Background

Flanders, W. Austin. Structures of Experience: History, Society, and Personal Life in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1984. [Looks at the major novels; chapters on "the isolation of the self," on form and language, on the family, on women, on crime, and on urban life.]

Greene, Donald. The Age of Exuberance: Backgrounds to Eighteenth-Century British Literature. New York: Random House, 1970. [Superficial and opinionated, but lively, informative, and accessible; summarizes eighteenth-century social structure and history (political, intellectual, and artistic).]

Humphreys, A. R. The Augustan World: Society, Thought, Letters in Eighteenth-Century England. 1954; rpt. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963. [A standard, now classic, general introduction; chapters on society, business, public affairs, philosophy, and the arts.]

Langford, Paul. A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727-1783. Oxford: Clarendon, 1989. [A rich but lengthy history intersperses narrative chapters on political history with chapters on middle-class and aristocratic manners, moral instructions, evangelical religion, nationalism, the economy, and political structure. Clearly and accessibly written, with useful summaries at the head of each chapter.]

Porter, Roy. English Society in the Eighteenth Century. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982. [As its title implies, a social history, interweaving chronology and themes, filled with lively details and anecdotes, explaining social groupings and their shifts during the century.]

Rogers, Pat. The Augustan Vision. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson; New York: Barnes & Noble, 1974. [A popular introduction to the period--fuller and sounder than Greene's, more up-to-date than that of Humphreys.]

Sambrook, James. The Eighteenth Century: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, 1700-1789. London and New York: Longman, 1989. [A topically organized description of eighteenth-century ideas-science, religion, philosophy, politics and history, aesthetics, and visual arts-providing "some sense of the intellectual climate in which eighteenth-century imaginative literature grew and flourished" (xii-xiii). Includes a useful chronology and bibliography.]

Speck, W. A. Stability and Strife: England, 1714-1760. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979. [Essentially two books: a topical consideration of constitutional and social history; a chronological treatment of historical developments. Speck is sophisticated and accessible (if a tad boring). Useful bibliography.]

Turberville, A. S., ed.. Johnson's England. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933. [Twenty-seven essays on various aspects of eighteenth-century English life by leading historians. Though out-of-date, it is a valuable source on particular topics. Profusely illustrated.]

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2. Approaches to Fiction

Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. [A sharp critical reaction against the theoretical realism of James and his followers (see Lubbock, below), Booth's wide-ranging study, perhaps the classic application of Aristotelian criticism to fiction, emphasizes the rhetorical relationship between authors, narrators, and readers. Particularly good on Fielding, Sterne, and Austen, but more recent critics object to Booth's approach as moralistic.]

Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978. [A classic of narratology. Asserting (with James) that the representation of consciousness is a central defining characteristic of fiction, Cohn uses psychological, structural, and linguistic concepts to explore three basic narrative techniques: "psycho-narration," quoted monologue, and narrated monologue. Sharply focused on techniques rather than texts, with a wide range of mostly modern examples.]

Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975. [Chapter 9, "Poetics of the Novel" (pp. 189-238), is a particularly clear-headed summary of structuralist approaches to fiction; theoretical rather than useful on particular novels.]

Iser, Wolfgang. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1974. [Considers the nature of reading and ideas of the reader as essential elements of fiction, and applies these topics to readings of particular novels; especially good on Tom Jones. A standard document of reader-response criticism.]

Lubbock, Percy. The Craft of Fiction. 1921; rpt. New York: Viking Compass, 1957. [Summarizes and develops Henry James's view of fiction, with particular attention to Proust; Lubbock's work remains important as a central statement of a critical position with which many more recent critics disagree.]

Scholes, Robert and Robert Kellogg. The Nature of Narrative London: Oxford University Press, 1966. [Self-consciously broad in approach and wide-ranging in material, The Nature of Narrative seeks to synthesize historical, anthropological and structural criticism. Chapters on the relationship between oral and written narrative, on meaning, on character, on plot, and on point of view.]

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3. Historical and Critical Studies

Allen, Walter. The English Novel. New York: Dutton, 1954. [A useful if old-fashioned introduction. Allen discusses the major novels of classic British fiction and many of the interesting minor ones. His critical judgments are relatively sensible, but the book is primarily useful as a guide to the "canon" of the English novel.]

Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. [The rise of the middle class is the story of the empowerment of domestic women, and that story is told in the English novel of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a genre increasingly written by women and incorporating female subjectivity. Armstrong constructs her admittedly overstated argument from her familiarity with conduct books, her interpretation of social history, and her readings of several novels, including Richardson's Pamela and Austen's Emma.]

Baker, Ernest A. The History of the English Novel. 10 vols. 1924-36; rpt. New York, 1950-67.  [A comprehensive account of the novel, though critically and even historically out-of-date. Hence it is practically useless for the major novels but a handy source of information on minor ones. Vols. 4 and 5 treat the eighteenth century.]

Bellamy, Liz. Commerce, Morality, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. [Argues that popular economic writings on one hand and theories of the epic on the other contributed to the writing and reading of novels. After chapters on economic and literary contexts, considers mid-century novels (Clarissa, Tom Jones, The Female Quixote, Sir Charles Grandison), novels about circulating objects, the sentimental novel (David Simple, The Vicar of Wakefield, The Fool of Quality, The Man of Feeling), and the "jacobin" novel (Caleb Williams, Emma Courtney, The Wrongs of Women).

Bender, John. Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in the Eighteenth-Century England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. [The novel manifests a discourse of power that changed social thinking, and especially ideas about incarceration and the design of prisons. Bender's argument, applying (not uncritically) the approach of Michel Foucault, is rich and interesting but analogical and perhaps specious. Includes readings of Defoe's Moll Flanders and Fielding's Jonathan Wild and Amelia.]

Brown, Homer Obed. The Institutions of the English Novel: From Defoe to Scott. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. [Argues that the destabilization of narrative order echoes and implies the instability of inheritance and of history. The novel as a definite genre did not emerge until he early nineteenth century, with Scott. The individual chapters (on Defoe, on Tom Jones, on Tristram Shandy, and on Scott's Jacobite novels) seem to deliver less than they promise. Oddly, for a book published in 1997, there is no substantial discussion of novels by women.]

Castle, Terry. Masquerade and Civilization; The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction.Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986. [The masquerade joins the theme of disguise with the theme of the carnival, especially as discussed by Bakhtin in his study of Rabelais. The disguises of fiction become a way in which voices thought of as subversive can join a more general discourse.]

Davis, Lennard J. Factual Fictions: The Origin of the English Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. [Argues that the novel originates in what Davis calls the "news/novels discourse," the intersection of social and political factors with the implications of print to create the ways in which people describe experience. Davis's study is brilliantly suggestive but at times narrow, inaccurate, and overstated. Chapters on Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding.]

Doody, Margaret Anne. The True Story of the Novel. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996. [The true story is a long one, in large part because Doody defines the novel as any long prose fiction and traces its roots in the Greek romance. Its three long sections explore the ancient novel, the influence of the ancient novel (pages 274-300 on the eighteenth century) and the characteristic tropes of the novel. At the center of the novel is the figure of the Goddess.]

Gallagher, Catherine. Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670-1820. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.  [The image of "nobody" connects the theme of identity to the function of the author (more specifically the woman as author) in the literary marketplace.  Includes chapters on Behn, Manley, Lennox, Burney, and Edgeworth.]

Hunter, J. Paul. Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990. [What is the relationship of the novel to various sub-literary genres that, in some cases, emerged in the generation preceding it? Hunter admits that it is seldom direct. The other genres helped to create the readers who went on to read novels, and they both created and reflected the culture in turn created and reflected in the novel. Despite its occasionally pretentious claims, the value of the book lies in the information it provides about literary types parallel to the novel.]

McKeon, Michael. The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1987. [McKeon argues, against Watt (below) in particular, that the novel emerged from epistemological and social instabilities. To make that argument, he devotes much space to reconstructing intellectual and social history and showing its reflection in instances of fiction. A learned if somewhat tendentious study from a Marxist perspective. Includes chapters on Cervantes, Bunyan, Defoe, Swift, Richardson, and Fielding.]

Richetti, John, ed. Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.  [Essay by leading scholars on the novel as cultural history, on Defoe, on Richardson, on Fielding, on Sterne, on Humphry Clinker, on Burney, on women writers, on the sentimental novel, and on Gothic fiction.  A particularly useful collection.

Richetti, John. The English Novel in History, 1700-1780. New York: Routledge, 1999. ["Eighteenth-century fiction is an important stage in the fashioning and a key tool for understanding of this evolving entity, the socially constructed self." The novel reflects the tensions and contradictions of a changing society. Chapters on the amatory fiction of Behn, Manley, and Heywood, on Defoe, on Richardson, on Fielding, on Smollett, on women novelists (Heywood, Lennox, Sheridan, and Burney), and on sentimental narratives (David Simple, Sir Charles Grandison, and The Fool of Quality).]

Salzman, Paul. English Prose Fiction 1558-1700: A Critical History. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985. [A great deal of information on sixteenth and seventeenth-century fiction (and the scholarship thereon), but the book follows a relatively predictable and old-fashioned formula: categorization, summary, description of scholarship, subjective opinion.]

Spacks, Patricia Meyer. Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English Novels. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. ["Fiction creates and conveys its truth through plot," by engaging the reader's desire, thus raising questions about the nature of truth and desire (colored, as they are, by gender differences). Discusses Lennox, Richardson, Fielding, the sentimental novel, Ann Radcliffe, novels of the 1790s, Austen, and Scott.]

Spencer, Jane.  The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen.  Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986.  [Argues that the position of women grew worse in the eighteenth century, as women became confined to the domestic sphere, but that this same confinement gave authority to women writing about that sphere.  The first half of the book traces the situation of the woman novelist from the erotic novels of the seventeenth century to the didactic ones of the late eighteenth.  The second half looks at heroines who reflect three reactions against the confinement of women: protest (seduction tales), conformity (didactic novels), and escape (Gothic romances).]

Thompson, James. Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. [How both fiction and the political economy represent value; how the novel represents one story about value and the political economy another. "There are six chapters, an introductory chapter on political economy, succeeded by a chapter on monetary theory, three on novelists, and a conclusion on literary history" (13). The novelists are Defoe, Fielding, Burney, and (in the conclusion) Austen.]

Todd, Janet. The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660-1800. London: Virago, 1989. [Literature does not progress, but novels written by women change from "an analysis of female signs and masks," through a moralistic preaching of "self-sacrifice and restraint," to a greater authority in Edgeworth and Austen (2). Discusses fiction by women in the Restoration, the mid-century, and the 1790s. Includes chapters on Behn, Radcliffe, and Burney (among others).

Tompkins, J. M. S. The Popular Novel in England 1770-1800. 1932; rpt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961. [Though obviously it can take no account of recent feminist and Marxist readings of late eighteenth-century fiction, The Popular Novel provides the fullest collection of information on novels few will want to read and argues the baleful effect of the commercialization of fiction.]

Warner, William B. Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684-1750. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. [The title provides an alternative to Watt's The Rise of the Novel, which Warner seeks, not quite successfully, to supplant by arguing that the novel in the first half of the eighteenth century is not a distinctive literary genre but a form of popular entertainment. Argues the point through readings of Behn's Love Letters, Manley's New Atalantis, Haywood's Love in Excess, Defoe's Roxana, Richardson's Pamela, and Fielding's Joseph Andrews. Rather turgidly written.]

Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957. [Argues that the central element of the novel is its "formal realism," which developed in the eighteenth century as an expression of emergent middle-class tastes and values. Excellent in discussing Defoe and Richardson; weakly dismissive on Fielding. A very influential study.]

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