ABSTRACT

In the nineteenth century, realism and the novel developed into the major narrative form that is so often the focus of attention from critics, historians and narrative theorists. The realist novel has commanded attention because it has been so supremely concerned with social setting (Snow 1978), because it allowed the development of a ‘great tradition’ which was ‘alive’ to its time (Leavis 1962), because it embodied the aspirations of the emergent and then dominant bourgeois class (Lukacs 1969), because it rationalized consciousness of time and space (Ermarth 1998) and because it provided domestic pleasures (Showalter 1978). For so many commentators, the novel is a noble attempt to place in narrative form the complexity of the social world and its contemporary flux. Raymond Williams, for example, in an analysis that was to be echoed by Anderson (1991), sees the development of the realist novel in the nineteenth century as concomitant with the rise and fall of a knowable community:

This formulation points directly to the firmly embedded belief that the novel possesses a special ability to depict the increasingly varied social world which gives rise to it.