Examples, Samples, Signs: An Artifactual View of Fictionality in the French Novel, 1681–1830

Historians of the novel typically use examples—a few mostly canonical works—to establish their desired narrative. The problem is that these chosen novels function less as true examples—representatives of a class of objects—than as signs of the invisible process (conceptual or socio-subjective) that is the coming of Modernity. This study approaches the novel’s history, and specifically the oft-debated question of its developing fictionality, by using samples of French novels from 1601 to 1830. This quantitative approach reveals that though the novel can indeed be said to “fictionalize” over the course of the eighteenth century, the customary explanations for the evolution are not supported by the record. I propose of that the novel is not one thing that modernizes, but in fact an ever-changing system of artifacts that should be understood through models provided by studies of technological innovation. Novelistic artifacts are invented, they evolve and spread, and they eventually fall into disuse, all in accordance with the values of their human inventors, and the constraints placed on the latter by the extant artifacts available for modification.