Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 The novel before “the novel”
- 2 Biographical form in the novel
- 3 Legal discourse and novelistic form
- 4 Novelistic history
- 5 Interiorities
- 6 Samuel Richardson
- 7 Domesticities and novel narratives
- 8 Obscenity and the erotics of fiction
- 9 Cognitive alternatives to interiority
- 10 The novel, the British nation, and Britain's four kingdoms
- 11 Money's productivity in narrative fiction
- 12 “The southern unknown countries”: imagining the Pacific in the eighteenth-century novel
- 13 Editorial fictions: paratexts, fragments, and the novel
- 14 Extraordinary narrators: metafiction and it-narratives
- 15 Romance redivivus
- 16 Gothic success and gothic failure: formal innovation in a much-maligned genre
- 17 Sir Walter Scott: historiography contested by fiction
- 18 How and where we live now: Edgeworth, Austen, Dickens, and Trollope
- 19 From Wollstonecraft to Gissing: the revolutionary emergence of women, children, and labor in novelistic narrative
- 20 Spaces and places (I): the four nations
- 21 Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Gaskell: politics and its limits
- 22 Populations: pictures of prose in Hardy, Austen, Eliot, and Thackeray
- 23 The novel amid new sciences
- 24 George Eliot's past and present: emblematic histories
- 25 The Bildungsroman
- 26 The novel and social cognition: internalist and externalist
- 27 Clamors of eros
- 28 The novel as immoral, anti-social force
- 29 Sensations: gothic, horror, crime fiction, detective fiction
- 30 Realism and romance
- 31 Spaces and places (II): around the globe
- 32 Imperial romance
- 33 The art novel: Impressionists and aesthetes
- 34 The impact of lyric, drama, and verse narrative on novel form
- 35 Henry James and Joseph Conrad: the pursuit of autonomy
- 36 Joyce: the modernist novel's revolution in matter and manner
- 37 Richardson, Woolf, Lawrence: the modernist novel's experiments with narrative (I)
- 38 Wells, Forster, Firbank, Lewis, Huxley, Compton-Burnett, Green: the modernist novel's experiments with narrative (II)
- 39 Beyond autonomy: political dimensions of modernist novels
- 40 Fiction by women: continuities and changes, 1930–1990
- 41 The novel amid other discourses
- 42 The novel and thirty years of war
- 43 Thrillers
- 44 Novelistic complications of spaces and places: the four nations and regionalism
- 45 The series novel: a dominant form
- 46 The novel's West Indian revolution
- 47 Postwar renewals of experiment, 1945–1979
- 48 The novel amid new technology and media
- 49 Novels of same-sex desire
- 50 From Wells to John Berger: the social democratic era of the novel
- 51 The postcolonial novel: history and memory
- 52 History and heritage: the English novel's persistent historiographical turn
- 53 Twentieth-century satire: the poetics and politics of negativity
- 54 Unending romance: science fiction and fantasy in the twentieth century
- Select bibliography
- Index
- References
2 - Biographical form in the novel
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 January 2012
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 The novel before “the novel”
- 2 Biographical form in the novel
- 3 Legal discourse and novelistic form
- 4 Novelistic history
- 5 Interiorities
- 6 Samuel Richardson
- 7 Domesticities and novel narratives
- 8 Obscenity and the erotics of fiction
- 9 Cognitive alternatives to interiority
- 10 The novel, the British nation, and Britain's four kingdoms
- 11 Money's productivity in narrative fiction
- 12 “The southern unknown countries”: imagining the Pacific in the eighteenth-century novel
- 13 Editorial fictions: paratexts, fragments, and the novel
- 14 Extraordinary narrators: metafiction and it-narratives
- 15 Romance redivivus
- 16 Gothic success and gothic failure: formal innovation in a much-maligned genre
- 17 Sir Walter Scott: historiography contested by fiction
- 18 How and where we live now: Edgeworth, Austen, Dickens, and Trollope
- 19 From Wollstonecraft to Gissing: the revolutionary emergence of women, children, and labor in novelistic narrative
- 20 Spaces and places (I): the four nations
- 21 Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Gaskell: politics and its limits
- 22 Populations: pictures of prose in Hardy, Austen, Eliot, and Thackeray
- 23 The novel amid new sciences
- 24 George Eliot's past and present: emblematic histories
- 25 The Bildungsroman
- 26 The novel and social cognition: internalist and externalist
- 27 Clamors of eros
- 28 The novel as immoral, anti-social force
- 29 Sensations: gothic, horror, crime fiction, detective fiction
- 30 Realism and romance
- 31 Spaces and places (II): around the globe
- 32 Imperial romance
- 33 The art novel: Impressionists and aesthetes
- 34 The impact of lyric, drama, and verse narrative on novel form
- 35 Henry James and Joseph Conrad: the pursuit of autonomy
- 36 Joyce: the modernist novel's revolution in matter and manner
- 37 Richardson, Woolf, Lawrence: the modernist novel's experiments with narrative (I)
- 38 Wells, Forster, Firbank, Lewis, Huxley, Compton-Burnett, Green: the modernist novel's experiments with narrative (II)
- 39 Beyond autonomy: political dimensions of modernist novels
- 40 Fiction by women: continuities and changes, 1930–1990
- 41 The novel amid other discourses
- 42 The novel and thirty years of war
- 43 Thrillers
- 44 Novelistic complications of spaces and places: the four nations and regionalism
- 45 The series novel: a dominant form
- 46 The novel's West Indian revolution
- 47 Postwar renewals of experiment, 1945–1979
- 48 The novel amid new technology and media
- 49 Novels of same-sex desire
- 50 From Wells to John Berger: the social democratic era of the novel
- 51 The postcolonial novel: history and memory
- 52 History and heritage: the English novel's persistent historiographical turn
- 53 Twentieth-century satire: the poetics and politics of negativity
- 54 Unending romance: science fiction and fantasy in the twentieth century
- Select bibliography
- Index
- References
Summary
More than half a century after the publication in 1957 of Ian Watt's seminal study The Rise of the Novel, those who conceive of the origins and development of the English novel largely in evolutionary terms still do not seem fully to appreciate the challenge presented to the expectations of contemporary “novel and romance readers” by the publication towards the end of April 1719 of The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner … Written by Himself. Daniel Defoe made strenuous efforts not only to distinguish his narratives from mere “Novels and Romances,” but also to convince his readers that what they were reading was “not a Story, but a History.” In itself, this particular ploy was not new. In the dedication to The Fair Jilt (1688), for instance, Aphra Behn maintained that “this little History” was not “Fiction,” but “Reality, and Matter of Fact, and acted in this our latter Age,” and most of Behn's immediate female successors, as Rosalind Ballaster has noted, tended to resort to this type of substantiating claim. However, in drawing his readers' attention in the prefaces to his narratives to the relationship between fact and fiction, Defoe emphasized the biographical element in his stories to an extent hitherto unheard of, and the response in the first half of the 1720s to the authenticating devices adopted in his series of spurious autobiographies appears to have been significantly difierent from that which occurred in the previous century.
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- The Cambridge History of the English Novel , pp. 30 - 45Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012