Restructuring the Rise of the Novel, 1958–85

This chapter surveys rise-of-the-novel criticism in the immediate wake of Watt, who set the terms on which the discussion would be conducted for decades and who became the figure everyone had to deal with. A wider turn to the rhetoric and poetics of fiction informed analysis of the early novel at this time, as literary criticism concentrated on narrative structure, technique, and genre, rather than historical contexts, producing a considerable amount of formalist supplementation to Watt’s sociohistorical approach. We might say that scholars broadly accepted Watt’s historical points but sought to clarify aspects of his account of the formal properties of the emergent novel. After outlining early responses to Watt, this chapter considers approaches to the novel through genre, plot, characterization, reader response, and narrative technique. The process of canonization I traced in Chapters 1 and 2 left Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne as the novelists before Austen who mattered. This narrow canon and the formalist tendency to focus on particular works mean that the treatment of individual authors and novels became important in understandings of the rise of the novel in this period.