Disjecta Membra: Smollett and the Novel in Pieces

Many seminal accounts of the novel as a genre have disregarded Smollett or viewed him as an oddity. However, the works of Smollett and his neglected mid-century contemporaries should be construed not as deviations from the main tradition of literary fiction, but as exemplary of the state of the novel in the period. Various aspects of Smollett's achievement as a fiction writer—characters that shiver into collections of quirky attributes, a thematic emphasis on fragmented bodies and fungible identities, paratactic plots that fracture into episodic patchworks, the juxtaposition of usually discrete styles and conventions, and diverse experiments with point of view—demand that we reconsider stock assumptions about the novel's organic unity and concede that the early history of prose fiction lies in pieces.