ABSTRACT
The essays in this volume have been composed in memory of the late Bill Ruddick, a notable scholar and teacher, an inveterate reader and reviewer of nineteenth-century fiction, and, for most of the contributors, a close and beloved friend. The authors engage with a selection ofliteral 'master narratives', texts which in one way or another represent growth points in the development ofthe novel. All ofthe essays explore what Fredric Jameson called the 'objective' structures of particular texts: 'the historicity of its forms and of its content, the historical moment of emergence of its linguistic possibilities, the situation-specific nmction of its aesthetic'. Most of them reflect, also, on the nmction of such texts as what Jameson called 'symbolic move[ s] in an essentially polemic and strategic ideological confrontation' with one or other of society's 'master narratives'. I
What makes some novels more indispensable than others, and what mysterious process determines their inclusion in a teaching canon? According to Terry Eagleton, 'Literature is a vital instrument for the insertion of individuals into the perceptual and symbolic forms of the dominant ideological formation'. In this somewhat monolithic view, 'Ideology adapts individuals to their social function by providing them with an imaginary model of the whole, suitably schematized and fictionalized for their purposes. '2 This loosely Althusserian notion became so commonplace in the late 1970s and 1980s as to constitute a virtual critical hegemony today. Macdonald Daly, for example, tells readers of Mary Barton that the novel is canonized because it is crucial to 'the selfrenewing programme of the bourgeois intelligentsia'. 3 Students are often taught, and may believe, that novels, especially canonical novels, simply reflect whatever cultural historians take to be the dominant cultural formations of the writer's epoch. Dickens wrote in an era of patriarchy: his novels, therefore, are interesting primarily as evidence of the pervasiveness of' domestic ideology'; the use of his fiction, if any, is to provide examples of the pastness of the past. Yet, as Raymond Williams insisted, the making of art is 'always a formative process', involving a tension between what is thought and what is being lived: what is 'perceived' and 'dominant' is already past (to Blake and Nietzsche one's thoughts are already merely the bones of thought) but the novel belongs to the present. The novel exhibits tensions between what is felt and what is merely thought, between the objective and the personal, between what is 'believed' and what is 'experienced'; its proper realm, then, is the 'emergent'.4 Mikhail Bakhtin's most characteristic proposition, the basis of his (debatable) claim for the primacy ofthe novel over other genres, is that the form includes dissenting voices and dramatizes fissures in what may appear a monolithic ideological formation: 'The novel comes into contact with the spontaneity of the inconclusive present .... The Novelist is drawn towards everything that is not yet completed'. 5
So the premises, even of what might be considered an ideologically cohesive body of criticism, can generate fundamentally opposed views of what makes novels, and what drives canon-formation. A conservative model of canon-formation suspects the novel, especially the realist novel, of serving the dominant structures of value in the bourgeois state; a radical model might see the canon as constituted by those novels which have most successfully, if not always coherently, expressed an emergent consciousness, challenged most effectively the received social codes, created space for new structures offeeling. In the essays that follow, each writer has kept one eye, implicitly or explicitly, on this question, while focusing on the claims of the particular novel to have contributed something unique to our sense of what fiction can do; to have brought some new fictional element into being, mastered some facet of the art of telling.
