New Criticism to The Rise of the Novel, 1924–57

This chapter begins with Ernest Baker’s ten-volume History of the English Novel (1924–39) and ends with Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957). In this period, a range of new ideas about the intellectual and social contexts of the rising novel, and about the formal development of fiction, were introduced. It will be shown that Watt’s field-defining study is, in some respects, a synthesis of ideas about the early novel that took shape in the forty years prior to its publication. Watt’s argument is here contextualized in relation to contemporaneous ideas, in particular as a reaction to formalist accounts of the emergent novel that dominated the early- to mid-twentieth century.