Paratext and Genre *

The history of prose fiction arguably goes through a somewhat unexciting period between its early bloom during the Elizabethan age and what, in the tradition of Ian Watt, has been discussed as the early eighteenth-century rise of the novel, albeit recently in more controversial terms. ¹ The period in between produced no dominant formal innovations and hence has never been honored with its own generic descriptors. ² One might wonder what it was that authors were writing, and how their readers knew what to do with such work; or rather, whether in the seventeenth century there existed a coherent tradition of fictional prose narrative. One way of avoiding the vexing debates about the uniqueness of a particular genre such as the novel (or the romance or the comic epic poem in prose) is to look at prose narratives at a particular moment without limiting the field of study to a group of texts that have similar formal or thematic features, such as realism or a love plot. Such a cross-generic approach, I argue, avoids issues stemming from turf wars between sub-genres and instead makes visible the range of a major genre, such as prose fiction, during a limited period of time. At the same time, it acknowledges Jacques Derrida’s ominous warning about believing in the law of the genre. In this chapter, therefore, I shall offer analyses of a diverse group of Restoration prose fictions, even reaching, for reasons to be given below, into dramatic texts. The main focus will be on their generic self-fashioning, in particular as it plays out in the paratextual apparatus accompanying these works. Their paratexts, I argue, present the process of genre formation as a dialogic engagement between authors and readers, one that is in particular need of explicit negotiation during the Restoration, the early and formative phase of a development that would later become the more stable genre of the novel.