everything else about the novel is. Where did it come from? How and why did it take form? How does the novel differ from the long prose fictions that preceded it from classical antiquity onward? How exactly is it distinct from long narratives in verse, from classical epic and medieval romance? At its best in the works of acknowledged masters like the great nineteenth-century realists such as Austen, Balzac, Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Stendhal, George Eliot, James, Manzoni, Galdó s, and Dostoevsky, does the novel communicate a truth about modern European humanity that is otherwise unavailable? Is the novel, in the hands of such masters of the form, an unsurpassed instrument of moral and historical knowledge? Or is it, as some academic critics have increasingly come to claim, actually a subtle means for the repression and regulation of individuals that only masquerades as an impartial rendering of the way things are? Is the novel really, as much modern criticism would have it, the imposition of an ideological view of the world, forcing upon its readers notions of linear development and of a stable external reality that are at best fairly recent cultural constructions? Does novelistic realism represent the naturalizing of a view of the world and of personal identity peculiar to postEnlightenment European thought and especially to white males with cultural power and economic privilege?
These are cogent and disturbing accusations that many of the chapters in this volume will present and even endorse in one way or another. But a traditional and alternative «humanist» view at least in part survives, even among the most politically sensitive critics. Should we hold fast, many wonder, to an older and much more hopeful view that the novel somehow records a struggle against imposed ideological and cultural limitations and points the way to personal liberation and self-fulfillment? Is the novel both a record of authentic individual consciousness separating itself from history and communal ideologies (insofar as-xiii-that is possible) and an impetus for its readers to achieve a similar liberation? Is the novelist an artistic visionary whose imagination, intelligence, and craft can render social and historical relations with a fullness that allows readers to understand the worm they live in?
For a history of the British novel, this last is the most important critical question these days, especially since the emergence of feminist criticism during the past quarter-century. A number of the chapters in this volume will argue that the British novel begins as a profoundly female form in several senses of the term. Even though the most familiar examples (the «canonical» works, as critics say nowadays) of British eighteenth-century fiction were written by men, the bulk of fiction produced throughout the eighteen century was written by women. Although we cannot be certain that the audience for this fiction was predominantly female, women seem to have been perceived as the core audience for much British fiction. Moreover, the early British novel, whether written by a man or by a woman, presents domestic life as its recurring central subject and, with its focus on the interior and private lives of characters, moves dramatically away from the traditional concerns of literature with public life and masculine heroism in love, war, and politics. Indeed, some feminist critics have extended this argument, finding in the emerging British novel the establishment of a new modern self that is, they argue, gendered female. For such critics, the novel articulates a consciousness whose sensitivity and interior self-awareness were, and to some extent still are, recognized as feminine rather than masculine personality traits. The individual that the eighteenth- century novel imagines and bequeaths to subsequent British fiction as the ideal moral and social personality is characteristically feminized, since (so goes the argument) its male heroes define themselves as such by acquiring certain feminine qualifies that include a self-effacing sensitivity and an empathic understanding of others in place of the dominance, self-possession, and control that typify conventional masculine heroism.
Certainly, the British novel in its eighteenth-century phase tends to deal mostly with domestic and private experience rather than public or political life, and marriage and courtship provide its crucial focus. Another strain of fiction, however, initiated in 1719 by Defoe's
The early British novel is not only for the most part domestic in its settings; it is also intensely parochial, attentive to the complex local networks of social and linguistic stratifications that to this day characterize British life. In trying to do justice to the diversity of local manners and dialects among the people of their island nation, British novelists, it can be argued, have helped to create something like a national personality by promoting an image of eccentric distinctiveness as the peculiar sign of the inhabitants of Great Britain. From Defoe's vividly individual rogues and whores to Fielding's and Smollett's portrait galleries of memorable country squires, innkeepers, servants, aristocrats, and petty criminals to Sterne's zany and self-obsessed narrators, there is a clear progression to the memorable quirkiness of many of the inhabitants of the British nineteenth-century novel-to Dickens's and Trollope's characters, for example, many of whom have come to represent for the rest of the world (for better or worse) the essence of Britishness in their comically mannered self-enclosure. But there is a more significant aspect to the eighteenth-century British novel's focus on quirky individuality. Perhaps more so than its French and German and Spanish counterparts, British fiction is in this representation of eccentricity notably alert to a modernity of personal expressiveness that emerges within new and more efficient systems of social organization.
That is to say, in its attention to radical particularity the early British novel records the characteristic stresses and strains of the momentous transition from traditional hierarchical modes of life to those rationalized and regularized forms of social organization that characterize the modern nation-state. As it develops in the early eighteenth century in Britain, realistic narrative comes to involve the ventriloquizing of particular individuals who by definition do not fit neatly into didactic or general categories. The difference between John Bunyan's
As the most advanced country in eighteenth-century Europe, Great Britain was widely admired at the time as the nation with the most flexible and stable political and economic institutions (for example, the most efficient tax- gathering apparatus of any European state) and the largest, most prosperous middle class. From its beginnings in the work of Defoe and Richardson, as many of the chapters that follow will show, the British novel focuses intensely upon the blurring of lines between those traditional status divisions whereby society had been organized for centuries. More than other European fiction, eighteenth-century British novels depict and dramatize the emergence of recognizably modern kinds of individuality wherein persons acquire worth, status, or power either by luck, by redefined and expanded economic opportunity, or by the exercise of extraordinary moral virtue. To some extent, the nineteenth-century British novel retains this singular, perhaps insular, focus on particularized characters, with their local surroundings and peculiar institutional circumstances, but it also acquires a more complex sense of history and society. After Sir Walter Scott more or less invented the historical novel at the beginning of the nineteenth century, novelists were necessarily more acutely aware of a broader, encompassing world of time and space. In the novels of George Eliot or Dickens or Thackeray, for example, individual destiny plays itself out in provincial British places that are thrown into relief against the backdrop of the larger world. More and more, the Victorian novelist embodies an overseeing or supervising intelligence that places individuals within those immense, controlling forces that we attempt to understand by labeling them history and society. The British novel opens up to include more of the historically changing and expanding world and is itself subject to — xvi- foreign influences, becoming part of a world literature written in English in America and other new English-speaking countries as well as in Great Britain. And the influence also works in the other direction. With the exercise of cultural and political hegemony first by the British Empire in the nineteenth century and then by the United States in the mid-twentieth century, English has become a world language whose literature occupies a dominant position in an emerging global culture that parallels
