The Rise of the Novel: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism by Nicholas Seager (review)

Nicholas Seager’s contribution to the Palgrave Reader’s Guides to Essential Criticism series, which offers overviews of scholarship on key topics, is intended for the very specific audience of graduate students in English literature. As Seager points out, it would be impossible to account for all scholarship on the eighteenth-century British novel. He therefore focuses on the central concept of the field, Ian Watt’s “rise of the novel” thesis, and winnows out any novel scholarship without a direct bearing on Watt. Seager begins his scrupulous coverage with a chapter on works before Watt and shows clearly that The Rise of the Novel was more a work of brilliant synthesis than of sheer innovation.

The number of works covered here is staggering; each of the ten chapters offers synopses of roughly twenty to fifty specific critical works. The synopses range from a sentence to four full pages, with the vast majority falling in the range from half a paragraph to two paragraphs. Seager takes very seriously his duty of fairness to the critics whose work he covers, and apart from a few rare declarations of particular respect (for J. Paul Hunter and Michael McKeon, among others) or curt gestures of dismissal, he offers almost no critical perspective on the texts he covers. His concluding paragraph makes this hands-off approach, which he sustains admirably throughout, seem almost shocking: “I urge the reader new to this field to test against the original all claims made about what Ian Watt argues, because although I forbear from naming names (because each critic’s argument should be assessed first and foremost on its own terms), in the course of my reading for this study I have found a considerable extent of misprision, and what is worse, misrepresentation of The Rise of the Novel” (189). Seager seems to have been caught, in this closing gesture, by the worry that he has not defended Watt’s work vigorously enough. His account of his own performance throughout, as an almost affectless reader, committed to presenting each argument generously on its own terms, is fully justified. But the implications are troubling. Perhaps Seager is right that misprision arising in the passion of a newly constructed argument should be overlooked. But why not “name names” when it comes to “misrepresentation”? If those who have published the most influential works of novel theory after Watt must be suspected of misunderstanding him, how will those readers “new to the field” be savvy enough, or grounded firmly enough in Watt’s work, to check all claims against the original?

Along the way, Seager does concede the validity of key critiques of Watt. From the outset, Seager has shown the possibility of seeing the novel simply as “prose fiction,” not different in kind from ancient and medieval prose romance. He accepts the feminist critique of the very limited and deeply masculinist male canon on which Watt drew. He acknowledges the justice of the claim that the very category of “the novel” remained unstable until the early nineteenth century. And he notes that Watt’s historical model of a rising middle class has not stood the test of historical scrutiny. Certainly, there is much left to admire in Watt’s brilliant and foundational text, but a clearer account of what exactly this is would be helpful, especially to the intended audience of graduate students and others new to the field. Although Seager covers Catherine Gallagher’s Nobody’s Story and several accounts of “fictionality,” I was surprised to find that Gallagher’s essay “The Rise of Fictionality” went unmentioned (in The Novel: Volume 1: History, Geography, and Culture, ed. Franco Moretti [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006], 336–63). I believe Gallagher’s piece to be the most effective and influential reassertion, in light of all the valid critiques mentioned above, of a Wattian view of the British eighteenth-century novel as...