ABSTRACT
Like most narrative, literary history is drawn to an organic metaphor, the useful analogy whereby literary forms can be thought of as engendered, nourished, and developed toward strength and eventual maturity by just those circumstances historians seek to delineate. Perhaps more than other genres, the eighteenth-century English novel seems especially well served by such an analogy, since the qualities often said to define it - social and psychological realism, moral complexity, narrative self-consciousness - represent for modern criticism a sort of evolutionary pinnacle of narrative achievement.1
