ABSTRACT
In preceding chapters we saw how, in the 1670s and 1680s, a vogue for deceptive wit combined with the demands of an intense national controversy to recast key elements of critical discourse. This established new terms for interpreting texts with uncertain relations to fact and fiction, jest and earnest. Crucially, the prominence of concepts of ‘shamming’ in political discussion during the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis ensured the long-standing influence of these concepts in critical discourse more generally, for the questions readers regularly asked of manifest party polemic – whether a piece was based in fact; whether it was witty; and whether it masked an insidious political or religious agenda – were also questions regularly asked of other types of literature. In particular, these were questions frequently of moment to readers of novelistic narratives. Publishers, authors and readers in the late seventeenth century used the classification ‘novel’ freely and broadly to serve their own immediate needs (often those of advertisement or abuse), rather than with prescient consideration for later attempts to define formal parameters for the novel as a genre. Recent criticism has, however, identified the characteristics late seventeenth-and early eighteenthcentury readers might expect of ‘a novel’. First, a novel was a short prose narrative (short, that is, in comparison with multi-volumed French heroic romances); it was likely to be translated from a continental original; it would probably feature intrigue and amorous encounters; and its action was commonly set in the recent past or in the present. It was also highly likely to make claims to recount ‘fact’ or (a far more vague assertion) to be ‘probable’, but would nonetheless contain substantial invention. Above all, it would be entertaining – although, some contemporaries would argue, only to the idle and misguided.1 The criterion of entertainment was the one Richard Bentley, a leading publisher of prose fiction in the late seventeenth century, had in mind when he decided that ‘novel’ could legitimately be used to encompass everything from an oriental romance to a droll discourse on cabbalism. A reader picking up volumes from Bentley’s collection Modern Novels (1692) would have found both these examples, along with an assortment of stories bearing diverse
1 See particularly William B. Warner, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684-1750 (Berkeley: University of California Press: 1998), p. 47; also J.A. Downie, ‘Mary Davys’s “Probable Feign’d Stories” and Critical Shibboleths about “The Rise of the Novel”’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 12 (2000), 309-26; Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684-1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press: 1992), pp. 49-60; Salzman, English Prose Fiction, Chapter 17.
