New Science and the "New Species of Writing": Eighteenth-Century Prose Genres

Genre theory cannot be divorced from the history of genres, from the understanding of genres in history.

—Michael McKeon

Since the late 1980s, Michael McKeon and several other scholars have undertaken a genealogy of the eighteenth-century novel. They have documented its precursors in epic, romance, and popular literature; its vexed relation to historical narrative; and its situation within a nascent bourgeois socio-economy. Yet this critical discussion has tended to neglect McKeon's proposal that historical scholarship ought to consider the history of the genre qua genre. ¹ Indeed, Paul Bator has argued that McKeon's study treats the novel as a pre-given category of writing. "It is only from a modern perspective," Bator suggests, "that we might wish to speak of an eighteenth-century 'genre' of the novel as a distinct conceptual or epistemological category, for, as [Ralph] Cohen and others have remonstrated, the novel was viewed as an 'interrelated or mixed form,' combining history, travel accounts, epistolary fiction, popular romance, satire, and so forth." ² Bator limits his observations about the historical specificity of generic categories to the novel, but his comments hold true for research on other prose forms. Consider the volume on the eighteenth century in the recently published Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. ³ The editors group chapters around the genres of poetry, drama, prose fiction, history, biography and autobiography, and periodical literature; the lack of editorial comment on this arrangement suggests it is self-evident. But would eighteenth-century writers and critics have accepted these distinctions? If so, how would they have understood the distinctions? What intellectual traditions influenced these categories? And how might a more historically nuanced understanding of the "new species of writing," to use a contemporary phrase, contribute to current scholarship on eighteenth-century literature in general?

Renewed attention to the historical specificity of genre allows us to see the extent to which genre itself was a critical problem during the late seventeenth and eighteenth century, when there was no consistent principle for distinguishing among forms of prose literature. The increased diversity of printed matter after the suspension of the Licensing Act in 1695 made classification even more problematic. Pamphlets, tracts, broadsheets, newspapers, periodicals, and short narrative fiction often experimented with generic categories; many went beyond traditional forms and did not fit easily within older poetic systems. Newly recognized prose forms, such as romance and novel, were not clearly differentiated from each other, or from history. Numerous writers, particularly those defending the artistic merits of early novels, thus set about trying to order the field of textual discourse.

We are most familiar with discussions of the romance and novel as genres of fiction in such works as Clara Reeve's The Progress of Romance (1785). Much has also been written about neoclassical poetic theory, the hierarchization of generic forms, and the influence of ancient models and critics on poetics. But less research has been directed towards eighteenth-century theories of prose forms other than the novel. René Wellek approaches the matter most directly in A History of Modern Criticism 1750-1950, when he remarks that "the neoclassical scheme was being undermined by the success of genres for which its theory made little or no provision: the novel, the periodical essay, the serious play with a happy ending, and so on." ⁴ Yet Wellek does not explore how writers and critics supplemented traditional theories of genre to include prose forms. Much of what we know about the distinctions made between kinds of prose literature in the eighteenth century comes from critical studies on the novel's precursors and its relation to historical narrative; but scholarship on language, rhetoric, and the new sciences has also elucidated the general distinctions made between forms of discourse. ⁵ The study of rhetoric in the eighteenth century opened new vistas for the...