Introduction: Genre Liaisons in Restoration Prose Fiction: Influences, Texts and Reception

Abstract

Introduction:Genre Liaisons in Restoration Prose Fiction: Influences, Texts and Reception Sonia Villegas-López This special issue approaches Restoration prose fiction from the perspective of literary genre, suggesting that there is more than meets the eye when reading and interpreting the narrative texts that were published in England in the late seventeenth century.1 The term that best illustrates these fictional experiments is "variety": of origins, forms, styles and topics. Part of this variety is due to its transnational nature, as some of the articles in this issue demonstrate. Indeed, it could be argued that the early novel in English was the repository in which different European and non-European traditions converged. Mainly French models, but also Italian, Spanish, and to a lesser degree eastern influences contributed to create the diversity of prose fiction in this period. A survey of the titles of printed fiction between 1660 and 1700 suggests that there were no unifying criteria for what the form was, and the same evidence can also be used to study the multiplicity of texts that attracted the attention of the growing readership of the Restoration: romances, versions of nouvelle historique and nouvelle galante, epistolary narratives, allegorical and political fictions, secret histories and oriental tales among them.2 The articles in this issue illustrate this variety of sources and origins that constitute the polyphonic nature of the early novel. Prose fiction has traditionally been considered the lay sister of the other Restoration genres, raising little interest among scholars of seventeenth-century literature until very recently. In particular, the study of the "origins of the novel" question since its early days in the 1950s repeatedly excluded the fiction of the Restoration with few exceptions, [End Page 3] precisely due to that fiction's lack of uniformity, its tendency to anonymity and its association with less prestigious forms. However, the situation has been reversed in recent years and renewed attention is being paid by critics to the workings of fictional genres and the cross-fertilization between literary forms which explain the development of the early novel. These studies include such influential works as Ros Ballaster's Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East, 1662–1786 (2005), Kate Loveman's Reading Fictions, 1660–1740 (2008), Gerd Bayer's Novel Horizons: The Genre Making of Restoration Fiction (2016), Jacqueline Glomski and Isabelle Moreau's Seventeenth-Century Fiction: Text & Transmission (2016), Rebecca Bullard and Rachel Carnell's The Secret History in Literature, 1660–1820 (2017), and Leah Orr's Novel Ventures: Fiction and Print Culture in England, 1690–1730 (2017). In these critical studies, Restoration printed fiction is addressed in its entirety and complexity. Their authors reject the "great authors" approach in favour of a more comprehensive analysis of the corpus as a whole, in the belief, as Bayer puts it, that Restoration fiction can be thought of as an archive of sorts, "a circumscript body of works that exist for later writers to build on or merely pillage from."3 In fact, translation, imitation, adaptation and plagiarism often recur in these early productions, providing an enthusiastic audience, thirsty for knowledge or just sheer entertainment, with a multitude of texts and editions to choose from. When looking at those texts, one is tempted to think that Restoration fiction evaded uniformity, purity and stability, which are actually features genres adopt to consolidate and compete among themselves. Yet the fact remains that authors who could effectively evade censorship benefitted from a degree of freedom to play with the new genre, since boundaries were not fixed. Restoration printed fiction also proved a fertile ground for other forms to expand and for genres to blend—verse, drama, and history, to name but a few—as Gabrielle Starr in Lyric Generations: Poetry and the Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century (2004), Moreau and Glomsky's 2016 above-mentioned edition, or John McTague's Things that Didn't Happen: Writing, Politics and the Counterhistorical, 1678–1743 (2019) have shown. This tendency towards experimentation and genre instability, which could be applicable to the fiction of the whole seventeenth century, became even more acute during the Restoration, mainly due to the influence of specific cultural or political events, like the foundation of the...