ABSTRACT
Mid-eighteenth-century novelists are renowned for what seems to be an explicit contemplation of their text's authorial construction, as the major works of Henry Fielding attest. Novels are far more than records of the cultural circumstances that inspire their unique imaginative productions. When early eighteenth-century novelists obscured their own role as creative makers and allowed their texts to parade as “everyday” ones, the very fact of their artistic construction was at stake. In the 1640s, Rene Descartes became the first philosopher to offer a physiological theory of generation; in it he asserted that life was essentially based on the motion of matter, rather than merely on the contributions of a parent organism. Preformation was the term allotted to the seventeenth-century belief that embryonic development is actually the growth of a “preformed miniature” that already existed in either the maternal egg or the male spermatozoon of the parent organism.
