2012 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
Cultural History and the Rise of the Novel, 1980–9
Published in:
The Rise of the Novel
This chapter surveys rise-of-the-novel criticism in the 1980s, a predominantly historicist period of literary scholarship which set about explaining how texts are the products of social and cultural forces. New, historically grounded, explanations of the novel’s emergence appeared. Tellingly, however, this chapter begins and ends with restatements of the enduring significance of Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel.