Content area
Full Text
The most influential story ever told about the origins of the novel is Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, published in 1957.1 Indeed, for the past four decades, the debate over the novel's origins has been framed largely by Watt's account. While Watt's followers, to this day, still pay tribute to his ground-breaking study of the novel's rise during the eighteenth century even as they extend and complicate his vision of literary history, his critics continue to articulate their resistance to the story he tells by challenging the selectiveness of his vision. In both cases, however, responses to Watt have focused on the content of the story told in Rise of the Novel. This paper explores the possibilities that emerge when the focus of critique is shifted from the content of the tale to its form. Such an approach to literary history adapts historiographic and cultural analytical models of contemporary critical theory to the debate on the origins of the novel. Reading Rise of the Novel through an interpretive grid of critical historiographic theory affords an opportunity to investigate the nature of narrative form in the writing of literary history and the ideological implications that attend the ongoing search for the novel's origins.
Critical historiography has engendered debates still current within the discipline of history proper about the nature of historical narratives; such debates are part of larger contests in contemporary culture over the politics of representation. The epistemological direction of much critical theory over the last quarter century has been to denaturalize those cultural values and practices that, viewed through the prism of ideology, have seemed natural, normal, and worthy of their position of dominance.2 This destabilization of naturalizing ideologies is the critical principle underlying the evaluation of historical narratives as "verbal artifacts" in Hayden White's historiographic theory.3 Because White's demonstration of the poetic structures of historical writing goes against the grain of conventional assumptions about the recording of historical fact, it has enriched the level of critical self-reflection within a discipline that remains, Dominick LaCapra boldly claims, "typically blind to its own rhetoric" in its adherence to a "'documentary' or 'objectivist' model of knowledge."4 Not surprisingly, the impact of critical historiographers such as White and LaCapra...