The Eighteenth-Century Novel and History

Dear Colleagues, 

In Ian Watt’s influential account of the “rise of the novel”, this new type of fiction broke away from ancient models and traditions. Its focus on creating something “new” and its emphasis on portraying the empirically surrounding characters, narrators, and events led it to reject history as a repository of cultural and philosophical models, as well as of formal patterns. With a few exceptions, the new novels narrated events that were set in modern and contemporary times, with spatial, temporal, and psychological specifics considered crucial. 

Michael McKeon has demonstrated how long-standing categories of aesthetic representation and ethical discourse underwent a crisis in the long eighteenth century, leading to a skeptical approach to historical matters that was reflected in the new narrative forms. This skepticism was combined with a new antiquarian and philological interpretation of history as well as historical documents that opposed traditional historiography aiming to educate the ruling elites. 

Everett Zimmerman has shown how fiction was viewed by eighteenth-century critics as less reliable than (antiquarian) history because “it substituted a more stimulating though less accurate representation of reality”, so that “the important issue behind this eighteenth-century contest between history and fiction [was] not precisely that of truth (for fiction claims its kind of truth just as history claims its kind) but of verifiability and adequacy”. While history appeared to be a more reliable representation of facts and events, fiction was perceived as a more nuanced and adequate way of reproducing reality. 

However, there is also a counter-history of the novel. Margaret Anne Doody has argued that subterranean links exist between the eighteenth-century novel and ancient romance, mediated by Renaissance romance. Studies of secret histories and prose satire, as well as the interplay between fiction and didactic in addition to historical texts, have complicated the “rise of the novel” interpretation of eighteenth-century fiction. In the second half of the century, a fascination with a different kind of antiquity, the Middle Ages, led to an extravagant representation of the past in the Gothic novel. New historiographical paradigms introduced by the Scottish conjectural historians, as well as by David Hume and Edward Gibbon, underpinned a fiction with complex roots in a newly conceptualized past. Both antiquarian and rhetorical historiographies co-existed and interpenetrated in interesting ways, although the path towards a divergence between the two approaches was traced. Fiction based on history, at least in its more hortatory functions and versions, aligned itself with traditional historiography and, in turn, derived some of its rhetorical structures and tools. 

We invite contributions on the interplay between fiction and history, competing or parallel narrative traditions, the structuring use of historical references in fiction, the fictional/narrative approach to history writing, and the issue of the adherence to truth in both fiction and history in the English literature of the long eighteenth century.

Prof. Dr. Flavio Gregori
Guest Editor

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