“Romans Divers”: The Novel, Its Earliest Classifications, and the Early Modern Peripheries of the Genre

Abstract

The first classifications of the novel date back to the early 18th century. Then, the novel was still a new genre and was defined in relation to ancient Latin or Hellenistic models and to their narrative variations from the 17th century. By analyzing the first works that try to trace a history of the new genre and a taxonomy of the various types of novels, penned by authors such as Nicolas Lenglet Du Fresnoy, James Beattie and Clara Reeve, this paper argues that the works seen as peripheral in relation to a canonical, archetypal narration, which is typical of the novel, are in themselves illustrative of a wider phenomenon – the marginalization of those narratives which do not fit a current and implicit definition of a genre. Using Corin Braga’s concept of “anarchetypal narrative”, this paper discusses the works to be found at the peripheries of the novel in the 18th century and the explicit and implicit reasons for their theoretical dismissal.