Expanding the Eighteenth-Century Novel between England and Germany: Sentiment, Experience, and the Self

Abstract

THAT SOMETHING WE REFER TO AS the “modern novel” emerged at some point in the eighteenth century is a commonplace in literary studies. The story of the “Rise of the Novel” is often told in one of two ways. The first, which we can call the ironic/self-reflexive history, has Cervantes's Don Quixote as its precursor and is represented in the eighteenth century by authors like Fielding and Wieland. The second, which can be called the sentimental history, could be said to have a precursor in Augustine's Confessions , and runs through Richardson, Gellert, and La Roche. The former is usually in the third person and involves a distancing narrator figure who comments on and frequently critiques the actions of the characters. The latter is often first-person and prizes emotional intensity and temporal immediacy. The former is the wellspring of the new aesthetic criterion of Wahrscheinlichkeit or verisimilitude; the latter concerns itself more frequently with morality (which has sometimes led to its dismissal as narrowly didactic). While each one has trouble accounting for works on the other side, both narratives are troubled by the works of Sterne, Rousseau, and Goethe. And each one is transnational but is nonetheless usually represented in the scholarship by only a very small handful of exemplary texts. Although I have sketched them here in the broadest possible terms (thus doing justice to neither), I want to suggest that although these literary- historical narratives do grasp something important about changes in long prose narration, their narrow focus on a small handful of nowcanonical novels makes their progressions seem too smooth and too inevitable. The substantial influence that the English novel, in particular, had on numerous national traditions—both in the eighteenth century and in the scholarship on the genre—tends to obscure the ways in which generic traits did not arise everywhere without difficulty and variation. Looking at a larger body of literary works—including those that even literary scholars often dismiss as “trivial” or just plain “bad”—enables us to see the fits and starts, the jumps and lags, fractures, misunderstandings, and the difficulties involved in the so-called rise of the novel. I want to suggest that looking more closely at the particularities of literary history can also help us think through the emergence of another “modern” entity in the eighteenth century—the self.