ABSTRACT
Before entertaining the weighty matter of what makes a ravelin a ravelin, I want to raise a different question. Let us assume, first of all, that the English novel has had a life, one that, having officially begun at some point in the eighteenth century, persists up through the present moment. The novel naturally looks different at different phases of its life: Samuel Richardson's epistolary and sentimental Clarissa (1747-48) creates a world singularly unlike the teeming, indignant verbal metropolis of Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1852-53), and neithernarrative bears much obvious resemblance to Virginia Woolf's lyrical, associative Mrs Dalloway (1925). As our own century turns, the novel now wears a new, postmodern mask epitomized in the paratactic, linguistically selfconscious, compulsively ironic pages of Jeanette Winterson or Julian Bames. Tracking such differences helps us to make sense of the English novel's life - to tell a coherent story about its transformations from time to time, and thus to discern its continuity over time.
