Introduction

IntroductionDavid Blewett The shelf-life of a work of literary criticism is rarely long. For that reason, the essays in this number—even when in strong disagreement with Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel (1957)—constitute a tribute to the remarkable staying power of a book that may be said to have opened up eighteenth-century fiction as an area of serious scholarly investigation. That honour is shared, as is sometimes forgotten, with another fine study of the early novel published the year before, Alan Dugald McKillop's The Early Masters ofEnglish Fiction (1956), its comparatively innocuous title nowadays even more controversial than Watt's. But it was Watt's thesis, announced in his title, that set off a long line of responses, many with titles alluding to his—The Rise ofthe WomanNovelist, The Origins ofthe English Novel, Before Novels, Institutions of the English Novel, The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, and, not without a touch of exasperation, The True Story of the Novel. The shadow cast by The Rise of the Novel is so long that general studies of the early novel are still written in its shade. Appropriately, the numberbegins with an essay by Ian Watt, the plenary address he gave in 1978 atthe annual meeting ofthe Southeastern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and now published for the first time. In a fascinating slice of intellectual autobiography, Watt mounted a witty defence of the critical stance and the terms he had employed twentyone years earlier, a withering attack upon French structuralism and the "monstrous assumption" that literary criticism is "inherently superior to literature itself," and a heartfelt plea for a recognition ofthe "common and equal possession of shared interests and feelings" of critics and readers alike. Several of the contributors to this number recall reading The Rise ofthe Novel when it first appeared and are able to attest to the powerful impact EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 12, Number 2-3, January-April 2000 142 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION it had on a generation of scholars and to its enduring power. Among them are the six essayists who come next. Reminding us of what undergraduate study ofthe eighteenth century was like before Watt's book appeared, Bliss Camochan analyses the reasons for its importance—above all its learning lightly worn and its "sheer readability": "It is the blending, howeverjudicious and inconspicuous, of socio-cultural-philosophical learning into the body ofhis argument that made Watt's book the right one at the right time." Max Byrd's is the tribute of a practising novelist to a master who knows how a novel is made: "I find absolutely true and right Watt's central argument that the 'defining characteristic' of the novel is 'realism.' " Both Michael Seidel and Robert Alter accord primacy to Watt in providing a lucid historical explanation ofthe social and cultural forces thatbrought about the paradigm shift in prose narrative in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Seidel in a wide-ranging discussion ofEuropean literature powerfully defends Watt's concept of "formal realism as a dominant characteristic of narrative during the early eighteenth century." Alter tests the "elasticity of Watt's underlying conception of the novel" against two postmodern novels "that would seem to run counter to the terms of the genre" Watt maps out. For Paul Hunter, too, remembering reading The Rise ofthe Novel shortly after its appearance is to recapture the critical excitement, the "strong reception" of the book, though he is less wholehearted in his admiration than the critics mentioned so far. For Hunter, Watt's "crucial theoretical and historical observation" lies not in his famous, "if somewhat slippery definition of the novel," but in his "insight about readers as makers indirect oftexts." Hunter here is primarily concerned with that great seeker of audiences, Defoe, whose treatment by Watt he does not find entirely satisfying, and he calls for a more subtle and complex approach to Defoe that "today's changing models of intellectual analysis" may be able to yield. Maximillian Novak, recalling the days when FR Leavis's The Great Tradition (1948), with its dismissal of most eighteenth-century fiction , was probably "the most influential work on the novel," tells...