ABSTRACT
New kinds of experience, notes Raymond Williams, were the basis for the novel's "extraordinary growth and achievement." Intimate genres of writing - the journal, the autobiography, the letter - informed the novel with its "sustained analysis of a situation or a state of mind." At the end of the eighteenth century, titles rose sharply. By their simple numbers, they became a "transforming social fact" (Williams 1983: 80, 73). Early modern history defined a change in structures that generate identity. Yet while new models for the self appeared, new controls opposed them. The situation, Stephen Greenblatt insists, was "resolutely dialectical" (Greenblatt 1980: 1-2). The novel was the site of just such oppositions. Indeed, argues Elizabeth Brophy, the novel questioned how society "estimated" women and it created "believable" heroines to "emulate." In doing so, it provided women readers with new ways of being (Brophy 1991: 238, 243).
