The Origins of the English NovelFactual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel. Lennard J. Davis

Abstract

aim of Lennard J. Davis's Factual Fictions is to disclose and explain process whereby genre of novel emerged from prior historical context in which literary category the both name and practice, had not existed.' Critical of other studies an assortment of methodological failures (a deterministic notion of causality, absence of all notions of causality, reliance on strictly literary idea of influence), Lennard Davis proposes an alternative method that will focus on profound categorial uncertainty that is evident in those authors whom posterity has agreed to call novelists. Richardson, and Fielding each claim to be beginning new type of narration, new species of writing, but since no clear conventions had been determined, and no real terminology had been used to define their attempts, they each had to create crudely categories into which their works might fall (p. 161). The aim here is to find categories and taxonomies that reader of seventeenth and eighteenth centuries might have used-even unconsciously--to divide up whole range of texts we now call narrative (p. 8). To this end, the novel, as such, is seen ... as discoursethat is, in [Michel] Foucault's usage, ensemble of written texts that constitute novel (and in so doing define, limit, and describe it). This ensemble by no means includes only novels and literary criticism (p. 7). Such an approach looks not for cause and effect, linear influence, but rather ruptures and transformations. At same time, it entails a rather special kind of historical materialism. In this view, novel is seen as discourse reinforcing particular ideologies, and its coming into being must be seen as tied to particular power relations (p. 9). Central to Davis's view of novel is an ambivalent reaction-an uncertainty to [sic] factual or fictional reality of work-that . . . one of major components in phenomenology of reading during early eighteenth century and which largely absent hundred years earlier (p. 24). And he sees origins of novel as the history of . . . division of fact and fiction, news and novel, movement from untroubled fictionality... to inherent ambivalence of Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and later writers (p. 223). novel was presented as an ambiguous form-a factual fiction which denied its fictionality by insisting, in variety of ways, on its own historicity (p. 36). It is one issue of a discourse that is forced to subdivide over course of seventeenth century (p. 44). What Davis calls the news/novels discourse is kind of undifferentiated matrix out of which journalism and history will be distinguished from novels-that is factual narratives will be clearly differentiated from fictional ones (p. 67). What is responsible this rupture? Davis denies importance of romance tradition, even as it may have exerted negative literary influence on