Rhetoric and the Novel in the Eighteenth-Century British University Curriculum

From the very beginning, then, the novel was made of different clay than the other already completed genres; it is a different breed, and with it and in it is born the future of all literature. Once it came into being, it could never be merely one genre among others, and it could not erect rules for interrelating with others in peaceful and harmonious co-existence. ¹

Although we have ample scholarly commentary on the contested status of the novel in the eighteenth-century periodical presses, literary magazines, prefaces, and occasional pamphlets by literary essayists and authors themselves, we have given little attention toward how the first professors of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres tolerated or, perhaps, promoted the novel. ² It is clear that this emergent, generically unstable, and frequently chastised—if not pernicious—species of “new writing” held only a precarious place in the context of the eighteenth-century academy. ³ Yet to assume that the novel was dismissed entirely by “polite letters” and not accepted until philology gave gradual way to literary history and criticism became more firmly established in the English universities of the nineteenth century, is misleading. ⁴ By establishing an historical record for the novel in terms of the eighteenth-century academy, this essay will attempt to account for an important channel of discourse which not only helped to define terms for institutionalization of the novel as a legitimate literary form of university study but which also entered and contributed critically to broader public debate about the novel’s social status and function. Despite the “rhetoric of” becoming critically talismanic of late, infrequently is the epistemology or aesthetic object being considered—the novel in this case—actually held within the scrutiny and standards of the discipline of rhetoric itself. ⁵ By framing this inquiry from the institutional setting of the university, I intend to argue that the novel or romance entered the academic picture precisely and tellingly at the moment when the discipline of rhetoric itself underwent a major and lasting conceptual shift of emphasis from laying out the rules for eloquent oral argument toward providing an analytical method for critical consumption of printed texts.

This inquiry will not apply an antiquarian’s historicist perspective but—after demonstration and clarification of when and where rhetorical discussion of the novel edged its way into the curriculum—will speculatively raise consequent issues of disciplinarity, canonicity, gender, and genre that merit our reappraisal. Turning and widening the philosophical arena from the public sphere to the secular or educational and back again should provide a richer contextual field for further study of several significant questions: whether acknowledgment of the novel in the universities pushed or hindered interdisciplinary approaches; whether gendered distinctions had an impact upon canon formation from the start; whether the novel achieved implicit or explicit generic status from within the academy; as well as whether or not the novel may be seen as a possible linchpin for legitimizing literary studies in the modern university. Reading the novel within the academic realm of rhetoric can improve our understanding of the transmission of social and institutional change in the eighteenth century as originating not from inside or outside a single institution but rather among popular, professional, and professorial critics and audiences alike.

Although it might be claimed that there indeed was no attention given to the novel until the formal, academic study of English Literature began to establish itself in the British universities of the nineteenth century, an examination of the historical record proves such an explanation facile. For while much of the public debate over the novel ensued in England, little if any discussion of vernacular literature took place at the elite universities, Oxford and Cambridge. ⁶ Because of curricular reforms that took place in the eighteenth-century Scottish universities and resultant pedagogical changes under the “fixed” professorial system, a platform for the novel was erected much earlier in Scotland than in England. ⁷ Although an attitude supportive of novels emerged in some quarters in France, as seen through the popular anthologies that were sympathetic toward women writers and toward...