“Conveniency to Nature”: Literary Art and Arbitrariness

Abstract

AbstractDespite its prominence in many critical lexicons, the term “literary convention” rarely receives sustained theoretical scrutiny. Rather, it has served interpreters, and even theorists, as a kind of general-purpose catchall, loosely synonymous with “custom,” “habit,” “assumption,” “myth,” “cliché,” “fiction,” or the French convenance. I argue that a philosophically rigorous definition of social convention may work heuristically to clarify what literary convention means and how it functions within a larger poetics. In particular, an intelligible notion of literary convention will help clarify the dialectical relation of mimesis and semiosis—what derives from the “natural” world and what results from an internal economy of parts and whole.