the global economy we hear so much of these days.
But whatever the British novel's origins or its ideological role since the eighteenth century in forming or reflecting an important corner of Western consciousness, the pivotal place of the novel in modern contemporary literary culture in Great Britain and in America is indisputable. Since the early twentieth century, the novel along with other literary kinds has tended to split more dramatically than ever into selfconsciously artistic and popular forms, as mass commercial culture has become a vast industry and as literary modernism and so-called postmodernism have fostered a separate realm of writing read by a tiny minority and kept alive by academic attention. But in spite of the gulf between the tradition established by writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and the books that make up the vigorous trade in popular best-sellers, the novel in numerous guises continues to flourish. Librarians and best-seller lists testify to the novel's centrality by dividing the world of writing into fiction and nonfiction. With glossy and colorful covers, in categories ranging from reprints of the classics to lurid bestsellers and sensational thrillers, from science fiction to romances, westerns, and gothics, novels in the broad sense of the word crowd the bookshelves of supermarkets, drugstores, airport souvenir shops, chain bookstores in shopping malls, and gas stations and truck stops on interstate highways. And yet for all its popular vigor, the novel still carries a stigma of frivolity and artistic inferiority, partly because it is, after all, merely a false story, a set of imaginary happenings that is by its very nature inferior in the eyes of many readers to, say, history or biography.
Perhaps the British novel has always been sustained by its perennial battle with its detractors, who have tended to view it with suspicion as a popular form and as something of a waste of time for readers who could be more profitably employed with true and useful things. In
Kermode's eloquent defense of the novel seems to be a perennial necessity, and 'Is the novel dead?' is a predictable theme when panels of novelists are convened to discuss the state of modern culture. Always in crisis and seemingly aware of its own fragility and moral and cultural ambiguity, the novel has been since its beginnings more of an occasion for modern narration to question its own purposes than a stable narrative institution. Paradoxically, that instability seems to be the essence of the novel's strength and endurance, and the collaborative history of the British novel that this volume attempts to provide will highlight for readers just that fruitful instability. Modern literary history is a stern and unforgiving taskmaster, in many cases nowadays interrogating the past (as critics like to say) to reveal its hidden complicity with power and privilege. Some of the chapters in this history of the British novel, collectively written by many contributors, will trace the roots of the novel's insecurity by pointing to the hidden-or at least obscured-cultural or ideological agendas of novels and novelists; other chapters will seek to contextualize novelistic production as inseparable from the demands of the literary marketplace or in some cases from the psychosexual pathologies of particular authors. But whatever the scandalous charge, ideological or personal, most novels can take it, since at their best they themselves are about their own shortcomings. The novel dramatizes the very failures critics attribute to it. Novelists deliver deep meditations on human complicity in social injustice; they point by their own lack of final answers and their tendency toward multifarious explorations of the moral world around us, — xviii- to the biggest social and moral questions. By shaping imaginary lives, the novel may thus illuminate what a culture most desires or fears. In reading a novel we can hear, as Bakhtin would say, the dialogue among competing versions of truth that is the novel's uniquely dynamic version of the truth itself.
— xix-
THE COLUMBIA HISTORY OF THE BRITISH NOVEL[1]
Licensing Pleasure: Literary History and the Novel in Early Modern Britain
NOVELS have been a respectable component of culture for so long that it is difficult for twentieth-century observers to grasp the unease produced by novel reading in the eighteenth century. Long before it became an issue for debate in literary studies, a quantum leap in the number, variety, and popularity of novels provoked cultural alarm in England during the decades following 1700. The flood of novels on the market, and the pleasures they incited, led many to see novels as a catastrophe for book-centered culture. While the novel was not clearly defined or conceptualized, the targets of the antinovel campaign were quite precise: seventeenth-century romances, novellas of Continental origin, and those «novels» and 'secret histories' written by Behn, Manley, and Haywood in the decades following 1680. The central themes of this debate may be culled from several texts: Samuel Johnson's 1750 Rambler No. 4 essay on the new fiction of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett; Francis Coventry's enthusiastic pamphlet in support of Fielding, '
These texts mobilize criticism and alarm, praise and prescription in an attempt to modulate the comparatively new vogue for novel reading. Francis Coventry mocks the unreflected «emulation» produced in readers by the French romances of an earlier day: 'This [vogue] obtain'd a -1- long Time. Every Beau was an Orondates, and all the Belles were Stariras.' Though Samuel Johnson could not account for the fashion for romance, his Rambler No. 4 essay describes the more powerful identification that recent 'familiar histories' like Clarissa and Tom Jones induce in their readers: 'If the power of example is so great, as to take possession of the memory by a kind of violence, and produce effects almost without the intervention of the will, care ought to be taken that… the best examples only should be exhibited.' If novels produce effects 'almost without the intervention of the [reader's] will,' then readers are at risk of becoming automatons, and the author must assume responsibility for the novel's moral effects.
The power and danger of novels, especially to young women not exposed to classical education, arose from the pleasures they induced. In The Progress of Romance, Clara Reeve's leading character, Euphrasia, remembers 'my mother and aunts being shut up in the parlour reading Pamela, and I took it very hard that I was excluded.' Closeted with a novel, some are included, and others excluded, from the circle of pleasure. Coventry remarks upon the tenacity with which readers clung to their pleasures: 'For tho' it was a folly, it was a pleasing one: and if sense could not yield the pretty creatures greater pleasure, dear nonsense must be ador'd.' Opposing this pleasure 'lecture would lose it's force; and ridicule would strive in vain to remove it.'
But what is so pernicious about reading novels? The Progress of Romance ends with a staged debate between the woman scholar Euphrasia and a high-culture snob named Hortensius. Hortensius develops a wide- ranging indictment of novel reading. First, novels turn the reader's taste against serious reading: 'A person used to this kind of reading will be disgusted with every thing serious or solid, as a weakened and depraved stomach rejects plain and wholesome food.' Second, novels incite the heart with false emotions: 'The seeds of vice and folly are sown in the heart, — the passions are awakened, — false expectations are raised.-A young woman is taught to expect adventures and intrigues… If a plain man addresses her in rational terms and pays her the greatest of compliments, — that of desiring to spend his life with her, — that is not sufficient, her vanity is disappointed, she expects to meet a Hero in Romance.' Finally, novels induce a dangerous autonomy from parents and guardians: 'From this kind of reading, young people fancy themselves capable of judging of men and manners, and… believe
