Novel horizons: The genre making of Restoration fiction

By Gerd Bayer

Novel horizons analyses how narrative prose fiction developed during the English Restoration. It argues that after 1660, generic changes within dramatic texts occasioned an intense debate within prologues and introductions. This discussion about the poetics of a genre was echoed in the paratextual material of prose fictions. In the absence of an official poetics that defined prose fiction, paratexts ful­filled this function and informed readers about the budding genre. This study traces the piecemeal development of these boundaries and describes the generic competence of readers through the analysis of paratexts and prose fictions.

Novel horizons covers the surviving textual material widely, focusing on narrative prose fictions published between 1660 and 1710. In addition to tracing the paratextual poetics of Restoration fiction, this book also covers the state of the art of fiction-writing during the period, discussing character development, narrative point of view and questions of fictionality and realism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jul 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781526100498

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Novel horizons

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Novel horizons

The genre making of Restoration fiction

Gerd Bayer

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Gerd Bayer 2016

The right of Gerd Bayer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN 978 1 7849 9123 4 hardback

First published 2016

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Out of House Publishing

To Florine, who came before the book.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Note on the transcription of texts

Introduction: making novel readers

Part I The rise of the novel as genre

1The novel and its critics

2The temporality of genre

Part II Paratexts: the genesis of genre

3Seventeenth-century writing: shifting forms

4Paratext and drama

5Paratext and prose

Part III The Restoration novel

6Narrating, telling, and speaking

7Types, characters, individuals

8Truth and fiction: reality and the page

Conclusion: reading a genre into being

Endnotes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

A number of colleagues have read and commented on earlier versions of this project. Particular thanks are due to Rudolf Freiburg and Dirk Niefanger for their sustained investment, as well as to Ingo Berensmeyer for his expertise. For sharing their knowledge on early modern fiction, I thank John Drakakis, Monika Fludernik, Brean Hammond, Thomas Keymer, Florian Kläger, Ebbe Klitgård, H. J. Real, John Richetti, Goran Stanivukovic, and Meir Sternberg.

I have benefitted greatly from feedback and discussions at BSECS and ASECS meetings, in particular from exchanges with Paul Michael Goring, Jeremy Gregory, Victoria Joule, Christina Morin, and Helen Williams. At other meetings and conferences I have met wonderful colleagues who have contributed to my thinking on both early modern fiction and other research areas, thus helping me keep sane in academia: thank you to Sharon Achinstein, Jan Alber, Katherine Arens, Ros Ballaster, Nicholas Birns, Martha Bowden, David Duff, Jean-Michel Ganteau, Sarah Herbe, Irene Kacandes, Karin Kukkonen, Sue-Im Lee, Miriam Nandi, Susana Onega, Rahel Orgis, Emmanuelle Peraldo, Chris Ringrose, Mireia Aragay Sastre, Janet Wilson, and Omri Yavin. My apologies to anyone I may have forgotten here; Birte Homberg (née Müller; 1981-2016) will not be forgotten in Erlangen.

At Erlangen University I would like to acknowledge the wonderful collegiality of Ulrike Dencovski, Oleksandr Kobrynskyy, Peter Uhrig, and Philipp Sonntag, who always make it worthwhile showing up at work. I also fondly remember the productive discussions and professional curiosity at the WIP (work-in-progress) sessions I ran with Nadine Böhm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruß.

Special thanks are due to a number of research assistants who have given a lot of their time, saving me a lot of mine: Verena Fickenscher, Susanne Fränkel, Tabea Gröhn, Charlotte Künne, Tobias Nitsche, and Martina Rottmann. I would also like to express my gratitude to our departmental secretaries, Barbara Gabel-Cunningham and Evelin Werner-Kretschmar, for always knowing which forms to fill out next; to our English department librarian, Karin Lindl; as well as to the professionalism of librarians at the British Library, the Bodleian, and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin.

At the very early stages of my doctoral research, in a millennium now long gone, I have received valuable and much cherished support, encouragement, and mentoring from a number of colleagues at Case Western Reserve University; and so I gladly thank Christine Cano, Margaretmary Daley, Christopher Flint, Louis Giannetti, Kurt Koenigsberger, and Enno Lohmeyer.

Even though I have met them as scholars and owe them tremendously for what I have learned from them, I want to thank them more specifically for their friendship and kindness: Luis José Bustamante, Claude Desmarais, and Vanessa Guignery.

A special thank-you goes to two very smart German backpacking bankers who were co-stranded with me very late at night at a railway platform in Rome during the Eyjafjallajökull incident and from whom I have learned much about how to speak to non-specialists about my research interests.

I am very grateful for the feedback I have received from two anonymous press readers and for the support by Matthew Frost and everybody else at Manchester University Press.

Note on the transcription of texts

Transcriptions throughout follow the original spelling but standardise ligatures such as the early modern English double s (ß) or the long s (∫). Errors in pagination have been silently corrected, unless extending to substantial passages. Where a complete text (such as a preface) appears in the original in italics it is here silently reversed to a standard roman font, with all moments of emphasis maintained.

Introduction: making novel readers

Un livre n’appartient plus à un genre, tout livre relève de la seule littérature, comme si celle-ci détenait par avance, dans leur généralité, les secrets et les formules qui permettent seuls de donner à ce qui s’écrit réalité de livre.

Maurice Blanchot¹

In 1671 Bryce Blair published a narrative prose fiction entitled The Vision of Theodorus Verax. The text was an unacknowledged translation of Erycius Puteanus’s Comus of 1609, a Latin work that had previously influenced John Milton’s Comus (1634). Discussing the various intertextual debts, Charles Mish speculates that Blair’s act of plagiarism probably went largely unnoticed by his contemporaries for the simple reason that his text may have been ‘completely unread’.² This episode in the murky backwaters of early modern literature introduces vividly some of the problems and questions addressed in this study. Blair’s shameless act of appropriation stands for the inevitable indebtedness of writing to earlier authors and at the same time shows that translation works not merely across languages but also across genres, allowing for the transposition of a source text into different generic environments. It thus testifies to the fragility of genre and simultaneously to the contingency of readerly traditions. Mish’s cynical comment about Blair’s lack of an audience furthermore confirms the role that readers play in the decoding of textual meaning and also points to the relatively marginal status that prose fiction had in the early modern age.

It is precisely this status, however, that stands in need of adjustment. While Mish’s indictment of the text’s impact on its contemporary readers is debatable, he was certainly right when it comes to academic critics, who indeed have for the most part ignored not only Blair’s work but Restoration prose fiction in general. It is telling that Mish’s 1967 essay remains the only entry in the MLA Bibliography on Blair’s work. Other Restoration fiction has received even less critical attention, with Mish and the early twentieth-century critic Arthur Tieje easily counting as the most productive critics of this episode in the history of English fiction until Paul Salzman, in 1985, published English Prose Fiction 1558–1700, a groundbreaking work that due to its covering almost a century and a half nevertheless only scratches the surface of the surviving textual record.³ In fact, Salzman notes in his work that compared with Elizabethan works, ‘[t]‌he fiction of the seventeenth century is […] relatively uncharted’.⁴ Critical studies published both before and even after Salzman easily confirm his judgement. Stanley Fish’s Seventeenth-Century Prose (1971), for instance, barely touches on questions of popular narrative fiction, concentrating instead on established major writers like John Milton, John Bunyan, Francis Bacon, or Thomas Browne, thus reaffirming the existing canon.⁵ The impressively comprehensive The Seventeenth-Century Literature Handbook (2010) also does not include prose fiction in its discussion of the major genres and movements of the century.⁶ Even more remarkably, the book’s section on ‘Key Critical Concepts and Topics’ avoids mention of prose fiction, concentrating instead on drama and poetry. Yet the book’s discussion of ‘Changes in the Canon’ describes three areas of critical interest: looking at neglected works by established authors; including formerly ignored genres; and the reversal of former discrimination against kinds of authors, predominantly women writers. While the second category begs for a discussion of prose fiction, no chapter provides it.⁷ There is mention of religious prose, travelogues, masques, and even the atlas; prose fiction remains marginalised. And all this, remarkably, despite the fact that Albert Labriola, in the same book, describes New Historicism, and its anti-canonical tendencies, as a significant force in seventeenth-century studies.⁸ When it comes to prose fiction, however, the canon seems to be firmly in place; and prose fiction remains excluded from discussions of seventeenth-century literature. Indeed, as William Warner notes with reference to specialist studies on the early history of the novel: ‘Even the most theoretically sophisticated and politically progressive of these recent literary histories return to familiar canonical texts to stage the formation of the English novel.’⁹

It is not for a general lack of insight into the period and its cultural development, though, that Restoration prose fiction fares so poorly as an object of critical study. Lord Macaulay already suggested in his 1860 History of England that the 1695 lapse of official censorship had contributed significantly to the rise of English literary culture.¹⁰ The relative freedom of book production at the time contributed substantially to a growing climate of debate and discussion, a political environment bordering on modern notions of the public sphere.¹¹ Indeed, William St Clair emphasises the importance that book culture in the early modern age played for the political future of the British Isles.¹² Relating the two phenomena, he suggests that ‘the experience of Great Britain differed from that of most other European countries whose governments continued to keep a tight, although seldom fully effective, textual control over the printed materials available for reading within their jurisdiction’.¹³ Restoration readers in England did not only have access to more and more printed material, they also encountered new formats. During the second half of the seventeenth century, for instance, the volume of periodical publication increased substantially, ebbing and flowing depending on the attitude that the changing political powers adopted towards the question of censorship.¹⁴ Accompanying this development, the market for simple prose fictions in the shape of chapbooks thrived. Itinerant peddlers reached even remote areas of the British Isles, making printed narratives available to wide sections of society.¹⁵ The book industry generally did quite well through all the political turmoil of the seventeenth century. In fact, John Barnard has described the period including ‘[t]‌he Civil Wars, and subsequently the Commonwealth and the Protectorate’ as an era that ‘offered new possibilities for authors and publishers’.¹⁶ The changing reading habits that accompanied and in part also supported these developments in print culture significantly impacted how literature treated its heritage, a tendency best reflected by writers of the early eighteenth century like Alexander Pope and his vitriolic critique of recent developments in writing, in particular what he and his Scriblerus colleagues considered the cheap and sleazy products of hack writers.¹⁷ The Battle of the Books thus appears as a skirmish over genre that pits time-tested formats against upstart popular reading matter.¹⁸

In this general climate of innovation, prose fiction was fully invested. At the same time its situation as a marginal tradition within the world of print culture allowed for various freedoms that were accompanied by a general lack of uniformity. While, as Salzman’s historical survey shows, English narrative had only shifted during the Elizabethan age from verse to prose,¹⁹ the Renaissance as a whole was witness to a range of innovations that generated new subgenres and minor traditions of writing. Rosalie Colie’s The Resources of Kind traces some of these inventions (and corruptions), showing that the process of genre making is a phenomenon that involves not just writers, but readers, publishers, and other members of literary culture. She very perceptively notes that in order to tease out historical genre changes it is necessary ‘to understand how literary works were thought to come into being’.²⁰ As one of her starting points she takes the historical understanding of the various genres at the time of writing, wondering ‘what kinds of kinds did writers recognise’.²¹ Colie describes Renaissance generic form as a rather elusive entity, in particular during times of change when published, ‘official’ poetics did not necessarily cover the whole spectrum of literary production. An alternative approach is required to describe such developments, Colie argues, namely one that reaches beyond the traditional poetological archive: ‘From real literature as opposed to criticism and theory, of course, we recover what is far more important, the unwritten poetics by which writers worked and which they themselves created.’²² During the English Restoration, unofficial poetics remained the norm. The elusiveness of such informal conventions makes it all the more difficult to discuss the impact that a text such as Bryce Blair’s The Vision of Theodorus Verax might have had on its readers. The existence of such informal poetics, however, raises doubt about Mish’s dismissal of the text as utterly inconsequential. The non-existence of contemporary written commentary about his fiction does not mean that Bryce’s work did not leave traces in the history of English prose narratives. Readerly and writerly attitudes towards popular genres like prose fictions changed substantially during the early modern age, but they frequently developed in obscure places, in anything but official treatises.

Yet influence there was, and some records even attest to it.²³ For instance, the chapbook narratives of the early modern age fascinated readers almost across the whole social and generational spectrum. Margaret Spufford has perceptively pointed out that respected eighteenth-century intellectual figures like Dr Johnson and James Boswell ‘read the chapbooks as schoolboys’.²⁴ They were certainly not alone as young adults who grew up with such reading material: she also discusses Francis Kirkman’s youthful reading habits, noting that ‘a lively system of exchange and barter of sixpenny quartos existed among his schoolfellows’.²⁵ Despite the general silence in the print culture of the time about early modern prose fiction, numerous readers were obviously very well trained in the formal features of the genre. Being socialised as young adult readers by the narrative fare of chapbooks and other narrative prose fictions, even ambitious writers of subsequent generations can hence be assumed to have been familiar with Restoration fiction (potentially also including Blair’s work). The corpus of this period’s output in printed fictions thus forms the breeding ground for later generic developments; it also forms part of its genre’s unwritten poetics.

As Colie’s comment about the frequent invisibility of substantial aspects within the early modern debate about poetological principles makes clear, it is necessary to look for unofficial forms of poetics in a description of fiction during the Restoration period. While various publications were printed at the time that could count as literary criticism, there was, in the words of Margaret Anne Doody, ‘very little about the novel as a genre’.²⁶ What little there was frequently did not appear in the context of proper theoretical or critical treatises about the art of writing but was printed in a more informal and at the same time more influential textual environment: ‘Translators and writers of introductions were major mediators of critical and theoretical ideas. In their ponderings a modern critical theory of the novel began to be born.’²⁷ This ‘pondering’ took place within the very object under investigation since the kind of critical writing that Doody mentions forms part of the oftentimes elaborate prefaces and introductions that characterise the paratextual apparatus of Restoration publications. Whereas Paul Salzman has suggested that writers of more popular kinds of written entertainment ‘were quite unconcerned with form’,²⁸ the ubiquitous paratextual commentaries about formal issues contradict his assessment: in fact, form was in a state of renewal, and authors seemed to have been very much aware of this. Salzman himself admits this shortly afterwards when he notes that ‘[t]‌he eclectic approach to fiction produced some ungainly experiments, but they testify to writers’ interest in searching for an effective structure for a prose narrative’.²⁹ This active questing for new formal traditions drew heavily on existing generic patterns, leading to a syncretistic development that depended to some extent on the continuity of forms from early modern English narratives to what is commonly considered to be the novel.³⁰ It also fossilised some of the genealogy of this particular genre in that the newly found uniformity of a genre relied on what Monika Fludernik describes as a process which functionalises traces of earlier generic models and assigns them new meaning.³¹

This process should not, however, be seen as a linear, teleological move towards the novel. In fact, this study is not so much about the birth of the novel, or any similar kind of claim that presupposes a moment of creation, but rather about the process of codification that accompanies already existing forms on their path to the supposedly stable shape of a genre. It is thus a genealogical analysis of the process of genre formation, of how out of a time dominated by experimentation and lack of coherency comes coherency and relative stability. Put differently, the genesis of genre investigated in the chapters below does not presuppose a moment of creation. In ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, Michel Foucault differentiates between the Nietzschean terms Herkunft and Ursprung, faulting the latter’s supposed linearity for engaging in the kind of retroactive account of history that is driven by progress and accountability. The term Herkunft, by contrast, provides a means for establishing the kind of contingent historiography found throughout Foucault’s discursive studies. The present study follows Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche, whom he presents as a critic who is highly distrustful of any intellectual endeavour that ‘assumes the existence of immobile forms that precede the external world of accident and succession’.³² This notion of Herkunft also applies to the genealogy of one particular literary form, engaging on a quest of the genesis of genre as a readerly textual communication.

The deconstruction of historical linearity conceptualised in the thinking of Blanchot, Nietzsche, or Foucault finds its echo in the selection of texts under investigation in Novel horizons. Since readers contributed significantly to the establishment of this new genre, it would hardly be helpful to limit the texts to be analysed to fiction written by English authors. Rather, the reading material has to be viewed in its entirety (as far as this is possible from the distance of more than three centuries), and this clearly includes work in translation that was available at the time.³³ As writers experimented with new narrative styles, they had to keep in mind what their readers were familiar with, and that consisted of all works published in the language they knew. While some few may have had sufficient knowledge of foreign languages to read French, Italian, Latin, or even German prose works in the original, a large percentage of the early modern literary audience may not have felt comfortable buying and reading foreign-language books. The steady stream of translation that supported the economic side of early modern book culture testifies to the conservative attitude towards language of a large proportion of the British readership; and also to their open-mindedness towards translation.³⁴

The initial source for the selection of texts in this study consists of the bibliography included in Salzman’s English Prose Fiction, augmented by entries in Mish’s English Prose Fiction, 1600–1700: A Chronological Checklist.³⁵ Further additions were drawn from the Short Title Catalogue and from searches in Early English Books Online for genre-specific title words such as ‘novel’ or ‘romance’. The historical frame of Novel horizons is set, on the one end, by the English Restoration of 1660 and, on the other end, by the year 1710. The latter date is somewhat artificial but, beyond producing a neat half-century as the period under investigation, there are two reasons that make this an almost logical choice: first, the implications on copyright brought about by the 1709 Act of Queen Anne substantially changed how literary texts were published;³⁶ and second, the growth of journalism around the same time provided a new forum for critical discussions of literature, in effect making para‑ textual poetics almost superfluous. Periodical publications such as The Tatler (1709–1711) and The Spectator (1711–1712), I suggest, moved the debate about prose fiction into a different textual environment, from unwritten to explicitly discussed.³⁷ The period in the history of the novel that starts in the early eighteenth century (after 1709, or for some critics following the 1719 publication of Robinson Crusoe) has of course been widely discussed (see Chapter 2): this provides a further reason (and welcome excuse) for limiting the present study to an earlier moment related to the Herkunft of this genre.

Concentrating on a historical moment when the question of genre was not answered by official poetics or doyens of literary criticism allows for an approach that privileges the actual literary material that has survived. This material is here taken as a form of representation that mirrors readerly competence. With little archival material that documents actual readerly attitudes towards particular works of fiction, it therefore is more promising to reconstruct readerly genre competence through the actual prose fictions and the paratextual material that accompanies them. As a consequence, the arguments presented in this study are based on the assumption that a crucial quality of genre is its force of textual encoding. As phenomenology, hermeneutics, reader-response theories, and poststructuralism have all shown, texts come into being through the act of reading. However, as genre criticism has been apt to point out, readers are anything but free in how they allocate meaning to textual constructs. While it is of course possible to misread a text, to miss information, or simply to misunderstand, texts usually go a long way to steer their readers in particular directions. Looked at this way, reading becomes a dialogue, a way of dealing with a body of knowledge: it is its own episteme. As a consequence of this, reading does not proceed along random lines. Rather, each text sets out a fairly straight system of paths along which readers are invited to stroll as they go through the book. One of the major signposts along this perambulatory process is a rather shapeless and insidious entity: a text’s genre. Itself often hard to establish, since its presence within an individual text depends upon a reader’s knowledge of other texts from the same genre, the textual aspect of a genre relies for detection on the presence of brief markers that direct the reader, often from within a text’s paratext.³⁸

One problem sometimes encountered in critical discussions of genre (a tradition discussed at length in Chapter 3) is the flawed assumption that genres have an existence in and of themselves, that they exist sui generis. However, genres have no existence outside the process that creates them: the reading and writing strategies that fossilise them as traditions. They subsist in re, to adopt Occam’s solution to the medieval debate on ontology.³⁹ What contributes to the potential fallacy of believing in the actual existence of genres is the assumed legacy of genres. As Gérard Genette has shown in The Architext (1979), the traditional separation into three main genres does not quite have the pedigree many critics are inclined to take for granted.⁴⁰ Genette’s historical analysis of generic separators reveals that much of what is considered established knowledge, gaining importance by means of assumed classical roots, is an invention of more recent times, in particular since the Renaissance.⁴¹ As he demonstrates, the classical separation into two modes (dramatic and narrative) and two objects (superior and inferior) allowed for four types of writing: ‘Setting the two object categories in cross-relation to the two mode categories thus produces a grid with four classes of imitation, corresponding precisely to what the classical tradition will call genre.’ This Aristotelian division, it is worth noting, does not assign a slot for lyric poetry; and the definition of narrative is sufficiently met by ‘a single word of introduction by the poet’.⁴² Neither poetry nor the novel is included in this system. Without repeating Genette’s detailed analysis of the historical developments of generic classifications, it is important to mention one additional outcome of his study, namely the difficulty of distinguishing between genres and modes. In other words, whereas genres (like tragedy) are marked by a specific content combined with a specific form of presentation, modes (like tragic) keep the ‘feeling’ of the respective genre without following its formal aspects.⁴³ For Genette, the mode, and its ‘mode of enunciation’, has over time come to signify what started out as genres: ‘The romantic and postromantic division […] views the lyrical, the epical, and the dramatic no longer simply as modes of enunciation but as real genres, whose definitions already inevitably include thematic elements, however vague.’⁴⁴ What Genette’s philological tour de force does not discuss (justifiably, given the subtitle of the work: ‘An Introduction’) is the question of how different genres and modes influence each other. Genette notes, however, that the two realms frequently mix: ‘There are modes (for example, the narrative); there are genres (for example, the novel); the relationship between genres and modes is complex and doubtless not, as Aristotle suggests, one of simple inclusion.’ Genette goes on to speculate about generic purity and contends ‘that a novel is not solely a narrative and, therefore, that it is not a species of narrative or even a kind of narrative’. Genres are always, Genette claims, the outcome of historical developments, in many cases the result of mixing earlier forms of literary expression. However, for Genette the real essence of genres remains mysterious, much of which critics ‘would perhaps sometimes be better off forgetting’.⁴⁵ Such defeatism is rather unwarranted. A view of genre that is less committed to the kind of structuralist positivism that shapes Genette’s historical analysis, and more welcoming to the complex dynamics of Herkunft and change, might indeed come to different conclusions.

While also partly committed to a questionable notion of empiricist factuality, Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees (2005) can count as one of the most radical recent redrawings of the traditional understanding of what genre is and how it works. It sets out to present ‘[a]‌ more rational literary history’ by means of ‘distant reading’.⁴⁶ In the first section of his book, Moretti uses a quantitative approach to graph a wealth of data that he eventually uses to explain the rise and fall of subgenres of the novel. His main argument is that change is what provides stability to the system of literature: every generation (roughly thirty years) brings with it new expectations to literary works. These expectations translate into new subgenres such as utopias, mysteries, silver-fork novel, etc. Moretti compares the logic of this ever-changing stasis to Thomas S. Kuhn’s model of ‘normal science’, calling it tentatively ‘normal literature’.⁴⁷ In his explanation for this process of structured change, Moretti resorts to social and even biological metaphors: ‘The causal mechanism must be external to the genres, and common to all: like a sudden, total change of their ecosystem.’ By disregarding this cyclical nature of generic change, many critics (driven by their specific theoretical approach and ideological slant) tend to over-inscribe particular moments as rise of X or death of Y, presenting these revolutions as rare moments when in fact, as Moretti suggests, change is how literature has provided itself with a stable ground on which to live. Theories – quite paradoxically, given their claim to general validity – thus tend to obliterate the larger processes at work in literature: ‘all great theories of the novel have precisely reduced the novel to one basic form only (realism, the dialogic, romance, meta-novels …); and if the reduction has given them their elegance and power, it has also erased nine tenth of literary history. Too much.’⁴⁸ Moretti sets out to reverse this mistake by taking a ‘distant’ look at large systems of literature such as ‘the’ nineteenth century. Yet, one has to add, full coverage of any genre during any historical period is next to impossible, for various reasons: for example, Moretti quietly passes over the simple fact that even a method that covers every book ever published during a particular century – an impossibility in itself – still falls short of offering a holistic description of that particular moment of literary history, simply for the fact that it cannot look at what is invisible, namely all those books that did not manage to find a publisher. Rejection by editors prevents manuscripts from entering the written archive, but such works nevertheless contributed to the literary climate of their age, if often in rather marginal ways.⁴⁹

The complexity of Moretti’s approach nevertheless makes his a welcome contribution to the discussion of how genres work, a process to which he returns in the last section, entitled ‘Trees’. There, Moretti draws from Darwinian evolutionary theory, presenting the tree model used in the description of species and linguistic families as a possible starting point for discussing the development of literary genres.⁵⁰ However, he points out that literary forms, just like other cultural systems, can move rather freely through time, reactivating earlier modes and reconnecting with distant relatives, indulging in a kind of anachronistic cross-breeding in which members of proper biological species cannot partake. The resulting model of a tree that Moretti adopts from Alfred Kroeber’s Anthropology does not have the linearity of the biological model, instead it has branches merge across the crown and even grow back into the stem. Unfortunately, Moretti does not relate his metaphorical use of the tree to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s differentiation of tree and rhizome.⁵¹ Moretti’s tree in fact resembles their rhizome, whose multi-nodal connectivity also transgresses one-dimensional linearity. The present study complements the spatial complexity of these critical metaphors by developing from the works of Jacques Derrida and M. M. Bakhtin a temporal theory of Restoration fiction as an anticipatory archive of future generic developments. For Moretti, the fundamental force to bring about generic change – an aspect of temporality as well – is what he terms ‘[a]‌ diversity spectrum’; he furthermore argues that ‘when a new genre first arises, and no central convention has yet crystallised, its space-of-forms is usually open to the most varied experiments’. For him, a genre in its early stages of development exists as a diversity spectrum ‘whose internal multiplicity no individual text will ever be able to represent’. In other words, genres do not come into being through a prototypical ‘masterwork’ (or a concrete moment describable as Ursprung), but slowly find themselves through diverse experiments. It is only logical, from the point of view of literary canons, that those very formative experiments simultaneously provide the ground for genres and make themselves obsolete: ‘divergence becomes indeed, as Darwin had seen, inseparable from extinction’.⁵² The institution within literary history that has power over life or extinction is of course the canon.

The issue of literary canonicity haunts this study in that the status of the prose fictions discussed below cannot but be described as minor. At the same time, however, this very value judgement does little more than reflect the current (and largely also historical) mode of approaching early modern prose fiction. Such thinking, as New Historicism contends, ignores the potential value for cultural history that ‘minor’ texts and genres have. In fact, the critical work done under the rubric of New Historicism proudly proclaims that its attitude towards historical texts breaks with tradition.

When the New Historicism encountered early modern studies,⁵³ and encroached more generally upon literary criticism, it felt like a breath of fresh air. By promoting the detailed study of texts hitherto ignored by traditional academic study, and by relying on contextualisation in a larger field of history, culture, the economy, as well as domestic and public life, this approach invigorated the profession by opening up new areas of research for a younger generation of critics. Its gestures towards materialism, and its claims to offer a new attitude to the past, not only impacted upon the ways in which scholars read, discussed, and evaluated the major writers of the early modern age – Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser, or Milton, to speak only about the field of English literature. New Historicism also drew attention to numerous new texts that hitherto had sat gathering dust on remote library shelves.⁵⁴ It was partly through such a reassessment of the canon that scholars responded to the research by critics like Stephen Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher. Looking back in their jointly authored book, Practicing New Historicism (2000), at the impressive reputation that the New Historicism has enjoyed in the field of English studies, Greenblatt and Gallagher nevertheless admit that at least some of the potential of the New Historicist revolution has remained untapped. However, when they note that the aim of New Historicist critical practice is ‘not to aestheticize an entire culture, but to locate inventive energies more deeply interfused within it’,⁵⁵ they seem to give voice to a certain impatience with the way in which the New Historicism has been received by the academic community. By stating that it cannot, or rather should not, be the aim of the New Historicism ‘to aestheticise an entire culture’, they appear to embrace some of the very logic that during the early stages of this critical movement they set out to overturn.

By limiting the range of New Historicist practice, Greenblatt and Gallagher’s statement in fact sits oddly with the fervor with which they originally attacked the privileged status enjoyed by canonised authors. What made the New Historicism so attractive, in particular to a younger generation of academics not yet anxious about literary and professional influence, was its willingness to engage with what had hitherto been considered minor works of literature. As Louis Montrose noted, one central concern of New Historicism was ‘the scholarly recovery of extant texts’.⁵⁶ Existing conventions about what constituted a legitimate text for critical study were thus disrupted. Catherine Belsey even went so far as to claim that this critical approach had ‘no place for a canon and no interest in ranking works in order of merit’.⁵⁷ Such a stance seems located at quite a distance from the sense of trepidation that shines through Greenblatt and Gallagher’s more recent retrospective comment about the supposed need to protect the truly aesthetic – the uncanny revival of the canon – from the onslaught of undifferentiating critics.⁵⁸

Already in Shakespearean Negotiations (1988) the ghostly spectre of the aesthetic had troubled Greenblatt. The book starts by presenting Shakespeare as ‘a total artist’, a claim manifestly tied to the power of canonicity. Yet Greenblatt quickly retreats from his totalising position, admitting instead that the playwright’s outstanding qualities only emerged because they resonated so deeply with ‘Renaissance modes of aesthetic empowerment’. Even though explicitly stating that he does not wish to ‘discard the enchanted impression of aesthetic autonomy’,⁵⁹ Greenblatt’s New Historicist practice is nevertheless marked by an unresolved tension. How is one to justify the extensive contextualisation for a reading of a particular text when this very text is itself merely an exponent of historical dynamics? In other words, Greenblatt introduces exemptions for some texts, namely those that betray a particular affinity to the aesthetic. Yet whenever Greenblatt sets out to read ‘at the margins of the text’,⁶⁰ he welcomes marginal works only from the extra-literary world, leaving to canonical authors and their major works all the attention afforded by their position at centre stage.

What marks Greenblatt’s approach to literary reading in his Shakespearean Negotiations is in fact an overpowering willingness to read literary texts almost exclusively through the prism of their non-literary cultural context, ignoring not only the fact that literature in its own right impacted on culture,⁶¹ but also the importance of intra-literary forms of influence. For instance, Greenblatt’s chapter on Twelfth Night extensively discusses various Renaissance texts concerning gendered identity and medical-sexual phenomena in order to contextualise the various forms of cross-dressing and homosexual desire observable in Shakespeare’s play. What the chapter quickly abandons, however, is the intertextual debt the playwright may have owed to an anecdote told by Montaigne,⁶² an anecdote with which, tellingly, Greenblatt opens the chapter. While admitting that this tale of transvestism figures as ‘one of those shadow stories that haunt the plays’, Greenblatt in his analysis almost entirely shunts aside this literary source. What he rightfully chastises as ‘the textual isolation that is the primary principle of formalism’ in his analysis metamorphoses into a general marginalisation of literary lines of influence. He justifies his reading of at times arcane treatises by suggesting that even though each individual text is ‘rarely […] decisively important’, a particular period’s discursive practice ‘taken as a whole […] plays a critical role in the shaping of identity’.⁶³ This nexus is marked by Greenblatt’s unswerving belief in the importance of mimesis, in art’s essential connectedness with the reality it sets out to represent.

When discussing the flow of literary energies in the introductory section to his monograph, Greenblatt focuses almost exclusively on ‘the relation between Renaissance theater and society’, seeing the two realms connected through an almost metonymic quality that bypasses their essential differences. Deriving from this logic, the New Historicist practice frequently discusses the flow of information as if it moved exclusively from the social to the literary, as when Greenblatt notes that ‘Mimesis is always accompanied by […] negotiation and exchange.’⁶⁴ What is decidedly marginalised in this approach is the way in which literary texts provide an environment from which a poetics of form also drew inspiration. Catherine Belsey has similarly noted that New Historicist practice ‘neglected its richest resource’ when it turned away from ‘properties of genre’ and the workings of intra-literary intertextuality.⁶⁵ Greenblatt’s brief mention of Montaigne’s anecdote at first appears to acknowledge the intertextual, and thus a literary debt, but his subsequent focus on the contextual, on textual sources beyond literature, effaces the literary line of development. Such a reliance on the mimetic as drawing inspiration mostly from outside its own generic and textual environment clearly subordinates the literary to the social. Yet by largely foregoing the literary, New Historicist reading habits appear to distrust aesthetic discourse at large. At least in part, this suspicion of the literary may stem from what the New Historicists disliked about the New Criticism and its belief in ‘the