Novel Machines

Abstract

Novel Machines argues that many of the most important formal innovations in eighteenth-century fiction were critical responses to the new prominence of machines in Britain’s Industrial Enlightenment. Although narratives and machines had been seen as sharing a basic affinity since Aristotle, their relationship acquired a new urgency in the eighteenth century as authors sought to organize their narratives according to the new ideas about nature, art, and the human subject that emerged out of the Scientific Revolution. Novel Machines tracks the consequences of this effort to transform the novel into an Enlightenment machine. On the one hand, the rationalization of the novel’s narrative machinery helped establish its legitimacy, such that by the end of the century it could be celebrated as a modern ‘invention’ that provided valuable philosophical knowledge about human nature. On the other hand, conceptualizing the novel as a machine opened up a new line of attack for the period’s moralists, whose polemics against the novel were often framed in the same terms used to reflect on the uses and effects of machines in other contexts. Eighteenth-century novelists responded by adapting the novel’s narrative machinery, devising in the process some of the period’s most characteristic and influential formal innovations. Novel Machines focuses on four of these innovations: the extended representation of the deliberating mind in Eliza Haywood’s amatory fiction; Henry Fielding’s performative, self-conscious narrator; Laurence Sterne’s slow, digressive, non-linear narration; and the atmospheric descriptions of acousmatic sound in Ann Radcliffe’s gothic romances.