Introduction

This study investigates the impact of friendship on formal and thematic developments in the British novel from the 1760s to the 1830s. It argues that friendship, a key concern of Enlightenment thinking, gives direction and shape to new ideas and novel strategies of plot, character formation, and style in these decades. Through analyses of exemplary texts, the study demonstrates that the narration of friendship was an essential element of the diversification of the genre in the second half of the long eighteenth century.2 Friendship influenced themes and narrative perspectives, and it endowed plots with coherent meaning by providing a narratological means to conjoin story development and character motivation. The motif also allowed for an exploration of individuals and their values as presented in the novels: with the textual focus on portraying the concerns of ordinary characters from various walks of life, novelists treated friendship not merely as an abstract,

philosophical concept; they also investigated the virtuous practices conducive to its realization in private and public interactions.