History, Poetry, and the Terms of Fiction in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

gross and in the detayl are mere invention, but invented only for default of truth: such are the imaginary Originals of most Nations. To these, he continues, romances are as innocent masquers to Rogues who taking the name, and personating such as are dead or absent, possess themselves of their goods by favour of some resem1 This paper has been completed with the assistance of the Charles Phelps Taft Memorial Fund of the University of Cincinnati. 2 The significance of history in eighteenth-century thought has most recently and fully been discussed by James William Johnson in The Formation of English Neo-Classical Thought (Princeton, 1967). See especially chap. ii (The Role of Historiography), and for a partial summary of recent scholarship, see the headnote, p. 270. Unless otherwise indicated, the place of publication of single works referred to in this paper is London. 3 Among other commentaries on the matter besides the standard works of J. M. S. Tompkins, A. D. McKillop, Ian Watt, and Arnold Kettle, of interest are Sidney J. Black, Eighteenth-Century 'Histories' as a Fictional Mode, Boston University Studies in English, I (1955), 38-44; Myron W. Taylor, Two Analogies for Poetry in the Seventeenth (unpublished dissertation, Washington University, St. Louis, 1960); Arthur Johnston, Enchanted Ground (1964), especially Appendix 3: 'History,' 'Romance,' and 'Novel,' pp. 234-37. More recent relevant material may be found in the work of Robert Donovan and William J. Farrell cited below. 4 In this respect the discussion in H. T. Swedenberg, Theory of the Epic in England, 1650-1800 (Berkeley, 1944), is useful; see especially chap i (Foundations of English Theory); see also Ralph C. Williams, Two Studies in Epic Theory, Modern Philology, XXII (1924), 133-58 (especially Part I, Verisimilitude in the Epic). More recently the particular question of the Christian merveillieux in the epic is discussed in R. E. Sayce, The French Biblical Epic in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1955); Robert M. Durling, The Figure of the Poet in Renaissance Epic (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), is relevant (see especially the discussion of Tasso, pp. 192-200). The prefaces of Georges de Scud6ry to Alaric (Paris, 1654) and Ibrahim are especially pertinent; the latter is available in the translation of Henry Cogan (1674) in Augustan Reprint Society Publication No. 32 (1952).