The Elevation of the Novel in England: Hegemony and Literary History

Abstract

In last few years question of novel's rise in England has felt all shocks and complications of theoretical and political critique. Although traditional literary histories of early masters of English fiction have been rewritten by marxist and Foucaultean literary histories, in at least one regard, more things change, more they remain same. Even most theoretically sophisticated and politically progressive of these recent literary histories return to familiar canonical texts to stage formation of English novel.' These literary histories extend an idea dear to Richardson and Fielding: of cultural novelty of their novels, of their radical and unheralded break with earlier novels. One of most efficient ways to break spell of this grand recit of novel's rise is to ask: when and why does it begin to be told? Modern attempts to tell novel's rise follow in wake of Richardson's and Fielding's efforts to introduce new species of English novels by displacing popular novels written, in six decades before 1740, by Aphra Behn, Delariviere Manley, and Eliza Haywood. The rationales offered by Richardson and Fielding for their novelistic practice are first drafts for what will later be told, within literary studies, as the rise of novel. By allowing Behn, Manley and Haywood to emerge out of footnotes and margins of literary history, recent feminist literary history-written in very different ways by Jane Spencer, Mary Ann Schofield, Paula Backsheider, Laura Brown, Judith Kagan Gardiner, Janet Todd, and Catherine Gallagher -offers chances for a fundamental revision of novel's elevation in England. In their literary historical narratives, Spencer, Schofield and Todd place Behn, Manley and Haywood at beginning of a tradition of novel which develops through Sarah Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, Frances Burney and Jane Austen. But this elaboration of a separate, semi-autonomous domain of women's writing serves to obscure what my own more inclusive literary history seeks to apprehend: specific role played by novels of Behn, Manley and Haywood in novel's elevation in 1740s.2 Neither traditional nor marxist nor feminist literary histories allows