and the early Haywood have a bad difference that puts them entirely outside the frame of literary history of the elevated novel.
Notice the reversal of vision that literary history effects. If we inter -18- pret the writings of Behn, Richardson, and Fielding as part of the cultural history of Britain, we can find complex patterns of antagonism and detect the conscious and unconscious efforts of each author to distinguish his or her writing from its antecedents. By differentiating his novels from Behn's, Richardson engenders many of the differences evident between their novels. By contrast, literary history 'finds,' upon the archival table of its investigations, different novels, which it then attempts to distinguish and classify. Differences among novels are no longer effects of history, but the initial data for literary classification. Thus the category «novel» acquires a paradoxical role: pregiven and yet belated in its arrival, 'the novel' is made to appear ready at hand, but it is actually that which the literary history of the novel defines. Often presented as the humble, minimal, and preliminary axiom of a literary history, the idea of the novel operates within the literary history of canonical texts as a kind of law. Changes in the idea of the novel during the nineteenth century were a necessary precondition for the belated emergence of the novel's origins as a compelling enigma.
Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the novel keeps rising, and The Columbia History of the British Novel is one more symptom of that movement. Space does not permit a full genealogy of the evolution of the question of the novel's origins. But I can offer a brief sketch of those changes whereby the question becomes one of the Gordian knots of literary studies. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, novels are collected, edited, reviewed, and taught in schools and universities. Three basic shifts in the category of 'the novel' are concomitants of this modern institutionalization of the novel as an object of knowledge in literary studies. First the novel is nationalized. Novels were once considered the type of writing most likely to move easily across linguistic and national boundaries. The critics and literary historians I have quoted in this chapter found the romances and novels of different nations on the same shelves. Reeve and Dunlop discuss the novels of Cervantes, Marivaux, and Rousseau within the same conceptual coordinates as the novels of Richardson and Fielding. But in the nineteenth century, novels come to be understood as a type of writing particularly suited to representing the character, mores, landscape, and spirit of the nation. At its most significant, a novel is, in the phrase of the French literary historian Hippolyte Taine, an expression of 'the voice of the people.'
In the wake of this idea, a thesis develops that would never have -19- occurred to Reeve or Dunlop: that the modern English novel has little or nothing to do with earlier novellas and romances, and thus it does not develop out of Italian, Spanish, or French precursors. Instead the novel is said to derive from distinctly English discourses: the journalism of Addison and Steele, the party writers of the reign of Queen Anne, the new Science, religious autobiography like Bunyan's, writers of travel and adventure, and so on. This position was first clearly enunciated by the nineteenth-century professor of English at Glasgow, Walter Raleigh, in his book
By narrowing the vortex of the novel's formation, a nationalist British literary history produces a new object of cultural value now dubbed 'the English novel.' The English novel becomes the subject and eponymous protagonist in a series of literary histories written by Walter Raleigh (1894), George Saintsbury (1913), and Walter Allen (1954). The phrase appears again in the titles of William Lyon Phelps's
The claim for the priority of the English novel made by this group of literary historians involves a shift in the novel's distinct identity: instead of consisting in its moral coherence, the novel's identity comes to derive from its adherence to some sort of realism. Although the kernel of this thesis is at least as old as the distinction between romance and novella defined by Congreve, Reeve, and others, the nineteenth century contributes an arduous and subtle development to the idea of what constitutes realism. With the development of the idea of society as an organic totality, the novel becomes-for Balzac, Dickens, and Eliot-uniquely appropriate for its study and analysis. Novelistic realism is complicated and enriched by those novelists-especially Flaubert and James-who undertake to aestheticize the novel. As art, the novel realizes its equality with poetry, and prepares itself for entrance into the 'Great Tradition' (Leavis's 1948 title) of Western literature. The idea of the novel as art means that novel studies, and literary histories of the novel, come to privilege the novel's 'form.' Claims for the novel's formal coherence are not fatal to the idea of the novel's realistic imitation of social or psychic life. Instead the two ideas work together in literary histories from Ernest Baker's ten-volume History of the English Novel to Ian Watt's
With the idea of the novel's nationalism, its realism, and its power to express a personal interiority emerge three questions that have preoccupied scholarly study of the early British novel for at least one hundred years. Out of the concept of the novel's Englishness emerges a new question: how, where, and why does the English novel begin, originate, arise? This question is framed so as to assure that its answer will come from within the study of British culture. Once the novel is given a modern, relatively scientific epistemological mission-to be realistic in its representation of social and psychological life-one must ask, what constitutes realism? What form of writing should serve as the paradigm for novelistic mimesis? These are not so much questions that can be answered as a terrain for interminable negotiation and invention. Finally, how is the Englishness and realism of the novel implicated in the invention of the modern subject? With Watt, and those many critics and literary historians who have followed in his wake, the notion that the novel is a fully actualized form of a nation's literature, characterized -21- by realism, is brought into alignment with two relatively new ideas about the novel's beginnings: its sudden birth and its distinctive modernity. Recently, new work on the novel's rise, influenced by Marxism, feminism, and poststructuralism, has sought to contest and complicate this classic interpretation of the rise of the novel. Instead of trying to summarize this rich vein of work, I will close with an observation. The themes of the novel's modernity and sudden birth, its realism and aesthetic greatness, its expression of nationhood or moral guidance to the reader-whether formulated early or late in the novel's 'progress'-all these themes serve to update the cultural project that unfolded in the eight decades after 1740, and that this essay has explored: the impulse to elevate the novel and to sublimate the pleasures it incites.
