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Introduction: The Drift of Fiction
- The Eighteenth Century
- University of Pennsylvania Press
- Voume 52, Numbers 3-4, Fall/Winter 2011
- pp. 243-248
- 10.1353/ecy.2011.0019
- Article
- Additional Information
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Drawing the trajectory from Ian Watt to critics like Michael McKeon, Nancy Armstrong, Catherine Gallagher, Deidre Lynch, and Franco Moretti, the Introduction to this special issue of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation engages the ongoing conversation about the novel -- an entity that remains provisional, open-ended, and far from monolithic. This special issue gives us a new picture of the eighteenth-century novel not so much as a unified body, but as self-conscious permutations of fiction that drift rather than march into mixed forms of realism. For this reason, fiction—with its meaning rooted in fashioning, framing, and inventing—is a more apt term for the elastic imaginative prose narratives of eighteenth-century England than novel.