ABSTRACT
Twenty-five years after its first appearance, Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel continues to be the most attractive model we have of how to conduct the study of this crucial literary phenomenon.1 The phenomenon is crucial because it is modern. If the novel originated in early modern Europe, it should be possible to observe and describe its emergence within a historical context whose richness of detail has no parallel in earlier periods. But of course this is no coincidence: it is the rise of an unprecedented historical consciousness, and of its institutional affiliates, that has both encouraged the preservation of historical detail, and legitimated contextual methods of study which use that detail as a mode of understanding. Watt7 s book is attractive because it is fully responsive to the call for a historical and contextual method of study that seems somehow implicit in his subject. Thus his concern with the rise of a distinctive set of narrative procedures - 'formal realism' - is informed by a concern with a parallel innovation in philosophical discourse, and these he connects, in turn, with a set of socioeconomic developments at whose center are the rise of the middle class, the growth of commercial capitalism, and the concomitant eclipse of feudal and aristocratic modes of intercourse. The analogy between these historical strands is most succinctly accounted for in their
shared 'individualism' - that is, in their common validation of individual experience - a term that allows Watt at various points to argue the importance to his subject of a fourth major strand of historical experience, the Protestant Reformation.
