The Rise Of The Novel: Studies In Defoe, Richardson And Fielding
Product Description
The Rise of the Novel is Ian Watt’s classic description of the interworkings of social conditions, changing attitudes, and literary practices during the period when the novel emerged as the dominant literary form of the individualist era.
In a new foreword, W. B. Carnochan accounts for the increasing interest in the English novel, including the contributions that Ian Watt’s study made to literary studies: his introduction of sociology and philosophy to traditional criticism…. More >>
The Rise Of The Novel: Studies In Defoe, Richardson And Fielding
I’ll agree this book is a staple in the canon of literary criticism and the history of the novel, but what about women writers? I think this book’s short coming is its oversight of authors such as Burney, Edgeworth, and Lennox.
What? No reviews of this classic? You cannot pretend to understand the novel in English if you’ve not read this.
In some senses, I guess this book is out of date. Watt deals with the most influential early English novelists, while taking care to show that they probably weren’t ‘Novelists’ as we think of them today. He’s not interested in expanding the canon, or arguing that less influential writers are better than his chosen three (Defoe, Richardson and Fielding). He doesn’t focus on gender, or race, or class. He doesn’t try to uncover inconsistencies within the novels he writes about. There’s no political puffery.
And thanks to these facts, this book should stand as a gold standard of criticism. He presents arguments, which the reader can disagree with on rational grounds. By not *focussing* on identity politics, he can actually describe the ways that gender and class work within the novels in question, and how the functions of gender and class in the real world context inform the novels. This is not an attack on Fielding’s sexism, or Richardson’s prudery, or Defoe’s avarice; it is an attempt to understand the authors’ attitudes towards the relationships of men and women, and the relationships of economic individuals.
Watt asks fundamental questions, and then tries to answer them, a refreshing approach 50 years after publication. Why did the novel arise when it did in England? He tends towards strictly sociological answers to these questions: the rise of individualism, capitalism and the middle classes explain the novel’s prominence. But this does not keep him from asking more formal and literary questions. He gives arguments for *both* Defoe’s relationship to individualist capitalism, *and* the form that his works take; both the context of Richardson’s sexual politics and the literary reasons for his using the epistolary form; Fielding’s ‘conservatism’ and the influence of neo-classicism on his novels.
I disagree with many of Watt’s conclusions, particularly with regard to Richardson’s ‘progressivism’ and Fielding’s ‘conservatism.’ Watt seems to rely too much on realism as a criterion for judging the success of the works in question, and this leads him to argue that Fielding’s works are more class-bound than they are). The mark of this book’s greatness is that despite fundamental disagreements, I’ll be taking this book as a model for my own work in the future.
Ian Watt’s exhaustive scholarly work on the emergence of the novel has proven invaluable in identifying what were the factors that allowed the novel to take its place in the history of English literature. With particular reference to Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, Watt gives an in-depth exploration of the growth of the middle class, the increase of literary habits of the general population through the rise of the city, the availability of the printing press and an interest in the woes and triumphs of the plight of the woman in the late eighteenth century. Well worth the read for those in college literature classes.
Although this is not an exciting book, it is highly informative and well-written. Watt makes a case for why Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding all have a claim to the paternity of the novel. Laborious academic bloviation is relatively nonexistent in The Rise of the Novel, and if you do much of this type of reading, you know that’s a plus. Even if your focus is not Defoe, Richardson, or Fielding, this book is important to read, just so you understand where your writing fits in the greater literary tradition, or even to give contemporary writers context.