Author: ashepher

My main thoughts after reading three sources about the growing dominance of realism in the 18^th century are that these sources can be used to deconstruct the idea of the realism mode being the most expert at describing the “real.” McKeon points out squabbling of the time about what form was the most realistic, and that the novel form that developed out of these squabbles wasn’t just one easily classifiable type, but a series of competing forms that influenced each other in their race to become more realistic. The competition he outlines—Fielding criticizing someone who was criticizing someone else—is to me a sign that no one form by itself is ever going to be perfect at expressing the “real,” not to mention a sign that there’s no universal understanding of exactly the “real” is.

Ross and Carnell stir similar thoughts because both of their works expose possible motivations behind the rise of the realism mode—motivations that were other than simply wanting to express what is most real; much traditional scholarship and definitions of realism, Ross argues, suspiciously fall along lines that remove women from the equation, and Carnell argues similarly that “those writers handed down to us as serious, ‘realistic’ novelists have frequently been either Whig or anti-Jacobite Tory” (9-10).

Of course, my task now is to take these ideas and connect them somehow to one of the novels we have read for class, and I am hoping that Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey might help me do that, since its content deals at least somewhat with the way that romance novels of the day influence the heroine.

Other ways I could see narrowing this topic would be to compare Richardson’s Clarissa with an 18^th century romance we did not read for class (but one that is similar to the style of Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina or Mary Davys’ Coquet) and examine the romance for the ways that it achieves a kind of poetic truth even if it does not achieve the kind of literally real experience that Clarissa conveys. Or, I could examine the romance for elements of the real that both Ross and Bowers argue they contain, while also examining Clarissa for elements of romance that Ross argues some of the realist novels—despite their authors criticizing the romance—also contain.

I question myself, however, even as I write these things, because this exploration is starting to sound somewhat like a witch hunt—I’m not sure what’s at stake that’s really valuable, in other words. Perhaps I have somewhat of a chip on my shoulder for the ways in which fiction workshops—in my experience—have more often tended to emphasize the telling of literal truth over the telling of poetic truth, and maybe there is a part of me that wants to reclaim the value of poetic truth? I think of an essay by Tim O’Brien called “Telling Tales,” in which he writes that while the questions of verisimilitude we frequently bring to stories and novel excerpts in fiction workshops are important, the problem he often sees with fiction in progress is not that it’s unrealistic, but that it’s boring. His essay makes me think, simply, that those of us who write in the realist tradition (myself included), can get too hung up on trying to present something that feels realistic instead of something that feels moving, important, poetically resonant somehow. Why do so many of us so highly value a work feeling realistic and believable over a work achieving these other—I would argue equally valuable—aspects?  

Updated 10/24/19: I’ve added my third source and annotation to the end of this list.

Mckeon, Michael. “Generic Transformation and Social Change: Rethinking the Rise of the Novel.” Cultural Critique 1 (1985): 159–181. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1354286.

McKeon argues that there are “great instances of categorical instability” that led to the rise of the novel: instability of literary genre categories and instability of “social categories” (161). He describes the first as “a major cultural transition in attitudes toward how to tell the truth in narrative” (161). And the second, as “a cultural crisis in attitudes toward how the external social order is related to the internal, moral state of its members” (161).

Regarding genre categories, there was on one side a criticism of “romantic” novels that became a “naive empiricist championing of ‘true history’” (163). But which was then met by a counter-critique that insisted the version these “naïve empiricists” put forth still wasn’t “real.” Fielding’s fiction, he argues, criticized the camp he labels the “extreme skeptics,” who had somehow become critical of “romance” in a way that made their writings become merely a species of an older type of romance. Ultimately, he argues that the novel came into existence “not in the isolated emergence of a great text or two, but as an experimental process consisting of many different stages” (170).

This was a difficult text for me, but one big takeaway for me is merely the witnessing of the “fights” over which narrative form was the most realistic. The squabbles happening over which genre was “best” at representing truth makes me feel that since then not much has changed: one person writes a novel, and soon after another writer writes a novel that somehow criticizes the previous for not being “real” enough but in the process executes some type of form that someone in the following generation will also find unrealistic.

Ross, Deborah L. “Introduction.” Excellence of Falsehood : Romance, Realism, and Women’s Contribution to the Novel, University Press of Kentucky, 1991. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uh/detail.action?docID=1915419.

Deborah Ross’ introduction argues that some of the debate surrounding the realistic capabilities of the “romance” vs. the realistic novel actually falls along gender lines. She writes the following:

“But this particular battle was clearly, in part, a battle of the sexes, a continued attempt to fortify serious literature against the encroachment of women’s writings, which were becoming ever more abundant and popular. When novels were the preferred form, writers such as Henry Fielding scornfully classed Eliza Haywood’s productions with French romances. And later, when romance was enjoying a new respectability, writers such as Sir Walter Scott wrote patronizingly of the “realist” Jane Austen. The need to draw and redraw lines that would keep women on the wrong side added zest to critics’ attempts to use “resemblance to truth” to separate “romance” from ‘novel'” (10).

Part of Ross’ argument, however, is that even the “realist” novels being written by men in the later part of the 18^th century were still borrowing conventions from earlier romances. And that the 18th “romances” written by women (Burney among them) held elements that were in certain ways very real and true to the people writing them.

This source, again, makes me troubled simply that we have a mode called “realism.” Is this mode more “real” than other modes of writing? I question its name.

Carnell, Rachel. “Introduction.” Partisan Politics, Narrative Realism, and the Rise of the British Novel, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uh/detail.action?docID=308021.

Carnell in this book is analyzing Richardson, Austen, and others from a political perspective: how were their novels commenting on the political parties of the time? Her overall thesis is essentially that the political partisanship of the time “helped determine the formal structures we have come to call narrative realism” (1). A couple claims in this introduction I found pertinent to my questions about realism: that more recent scholarship of the 18^th century novel has been “cautious about focusing on formalist conventions that have been used to distinguish ‘great’ from ‘lesser’ works of literature” (1). And that what for a time was honored as the most realistic novels of the century falls not just along gender lines but also at times along political lines:

“Given the outcome of the events of 1688 and the subsequent emergence of Whig political dominance in eighteenth-century Britain, those writers handed down to us as serious, ‘realistic’ novelists have frequently been either Whig or anti-Jacobite Tory. Defoe has been admired since the early nineteenth century for his ‘natural painting.’ Fielding and Austen have been touted for their use of irony in depicting the social realities of their eras. By contrast, the narrative irony in Eliza Haywood’s late pro-Jacobite novels has rarely been mentioned by critics, and the pro-Stuart Behn is seldom considered a realist novelist, even though she employs many of the techniques associated with narrative realism in traditional scholarship” (9-10).

Mckeon, Michael. “Watt’s Rise of the Novel within the Tradition of the Rise of the Novel.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 12, no. 2, 253–276. Project Muse.  http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/eighteenth_century_fiction/v0 12/12.2-3.mckeon.html.

McKeon situates Ian Watt’s Rise of the Novel within other prominent theorists who have tried to capture, linguistically, what a “novel” is and how it began. He points out both similarities and differences between the theories of Georg Lukács, José Ortega y Gasset, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Watt. One similarity I glean from his comparisons is that all theorists speak about a kind of break from work that pre-supposes a collective understanding—for instance, a break from some kind of agreed-upon “types” as we’ve discussed in class—and a shift instead to something that “purports to be an authentic account of the actual experiences of individuals” (Watt qtd. by McKeon 270).  

Because I was particularly interested in Watt’s arguments about how Clarissa differs from other works of its time, I have been looking into other sources about the history of the novel form. This source is helping to familiarize me with early theories of the novel and how more recent studies labeled “narrative theory” or “narratology” differ from the style and focus of those early theories.

Seidel, Michael. “The Man Who Came to Dinner: Ian Watt and the Theory of Formal Realism.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 12 no. 2, 193–212. Project Muse. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/eighteenth_ century _fiction/v0 12/12.2-3.seidel.html.

Seidel points out that many criticisms have been made against Ian Watt’s Rise of the Novel, and that many of them are true: Watt doesn’t show a clear understanding of the deep variance of the novel form, fails “to acknowledge the existence of realist fiction much earlier and in other places than England,” and his use of the term “novel” is problematic, among other criticisms (120-21). But, ultimately, this article argues we should still value Rise of the Novel’s contribution to literary criticism, and that the major thing it gets right is that realism (and Seidel defines realism essentially the same as Watt does) dominated English narratives of the early 18^th century, and that this domination didn’t exist previously. Seidel differentiates between impulses of realism and realism that dominates a narrative.

I looked at this source because I have been curious to know if there is much debate about what classifies as the first “novel.” This source helped me get glimpses of that debate. I gather that Seidel agrees with Watt that the 18^th century brought us a dominance of literary realism in general through, among other things, a plethora of narratives like Clarissa that are dominated by realism, but didn’t necessarily bring us realism.