The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740, combines historical analysis and readings of extraordinarily diverse texts to reconceive the foundations of the dominant genre of the modern era. Now, on the fifteenth anniversary of its initial publication, The Origins of the English Novel stands as essential reading. The anniversary edition features a new introduction in which the author reflects on the considerable response and commentary the book has attracted since its publication by describing dialectical method and by applying it to early modern notions of gender. Challenging prevailing theories that tie the origins of the novel to the ascendancy of ''realism'' and the ''middle class,'' McKeon argues that this new genre arose in response to the profound instability of literary and social categories. Between 1600 and 1740, momentous changes took place in European attitudes toward truth in narrative and toward virtue in the individual and the social order. The novel emerged, McKeon contends, as a cultural instrument designed to engage the epistemological and social crises of the age.
Contents:
Acknowledgments Introduction to the Fifteenth Anniversary Edition Introduction: Dialectical Method in Literary History
PART I QUESTIONS OF TRUTH Chapter One: The Destabilization of Generic Categories Chapter Two: The Evidence of the Senses: Secularization and Epistemological Crisis Chapter Three: Histories of the Individual
PART II QUESTIONS OF VIRTUE Chapter Four: The Destabilization of Social Categories Chapter Five: Absolutism and Capitalist Ideology: The Volatility of Reform Chapter Six: Stories of Virtue
PART III THE DIALECTICAL CONSTITUTION OF THE NOVEL Chapter Seven: Romance Transformations (I) : Cervantes and the Disenchantment of the World Chapter Eight: Romance Transformations (II) : Bunyan and Literalization of Allegory Chapter Nine: Parables of the Younger Son (I) : Defoe and the Naturalization of Desire Chapter Ten: Parables of the Younger Son (II) : Swift and the Containment of Desire Chapter Eleven: The Institutionalization of Conflict (I) : Richardson and the Domestication of Service Chapter Twelve: The Institutionalization of Conflict (II) : Fielding and the Instrumentality of Belief
Conclusion Notes Index
""The last two decades have been turbulent ones for the study of the novel, and most of the waves have been created by Michael McKeon... The fifteenth anniversary edition... offers the opportunity to reflect on McKeon's extraordinary contribution to studies of the novel... Because the work is so careful and the thinking so precise, I find the story he tells just as compelling now as in the 1980s and, if anything, more satisfying in its comprehension of issues and weaving them into a coherent whole.""
